"The question we’re asking is: Do retractions trigger, at an individual level, something like an infection mechanism, where the retracted author is being punished and discredited for being dishonest or just incompetent?" says Alessandro Bonatti, an associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Life scientists who have published papers that are retracted by journals subsequently suffer a 10 percent drop in citations of their remaining work, compared to similar but unaffected scientists, according to a new study by MIT researchers. Examining hundreds of cases over a 30-year period, the research quantifies the extent that one discredited study - whether an act of malfeasance or a sloppy piece of research - has on the overall reputation of academic scientists. "The question we're asking is: Do retractions trigger, at an individual level, something like an infection mechanism, where the retracted author is being punished and discredited for being dishonest or just incompetent?" says Alessandro Bonatti, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Mangement and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study. "We find that yes, there is such a mechanism in place, and it operates through citations." The study also finds that, in cases of clear misconduct, high-profile scientists who have a paper retracted experience an even larger drop - 20 percent - in the citations of their additional work. The study adds to a growing literature on retractions and related problems in science, and suggests that the system of peer-review, while not perfect, does give people in the scientific community room to change their preferences about the quality of work presented to them. As the authors write in the paper, the academic process of peer review may not provide "the optimal incentive system" in every regard, but the results do run against the "narrative that regards peer review as fundamentally undermined by..
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