Pay attention to retraction notices when collecting and reading articles. The use and continued citation of bad research can have a long-term effect on the fundamental credibility of the scholarship.
An article is retracted by a journal when the journal no longer considers it credible. Articles are retracted for a variety of reasons, including:
Articles in need of retraction are often identified by volunteer researchers who recognize the signs of bad research. Open peer review commenters can also call attention to the problem.
Zotero Desktop includes a folder that collects retraction notices for articles added to your library if it detects any. Review this folder periodically to make sure you're not using bad research.
The citation indexes Scopus and Web of Science include a means to filter for or filter out retracted articles.
The research news blog Retraction Watch has compiled a database of retracted articles, available on its own and also incorporated into CrossRef data.
Search for an article or author to determine retraction status.
Retraction Watch: "Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process"While there are federal agencies that track federal funding, there is as yet no official watchdog of the results of misconduct, specifically misconduct that leads to a paper being retracted and taken out of the public record. The internet has made it easier to track retractions on a large scale, and since 2010 the blog Retraction Watch has reported on retractions as they find them.
The blog, led by science journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, takes a journalistic approach to the issue, and they record instances of retractions and provide further information on the subject from the journal editors and paper authors when possible. Their observation of an otherwise amorphous business has made it possible to observe patterns in retractions, and get a better sense of how often papers are pulled.
As you find and read scholarly articles and conference papers, you may notice the following signs of papers written by paper mills or AI:
In the publication process, preprints are the draft text written by the original author(s) as it is submitted to the journal but before going through peer review.
Some fields have long incorporated preprints into the dissemination of research, such as physics and computer science, while others, including the biomedical fields, have only recently begun to do so. Preprint servers make it much easier to share these documents so they will sometimes come up in your search results, moreso in Google Scholar than something like Scopus, which lists them in a separate tab from the published articles.
However, there is a risk when using a preprint in your research as the work has not been peer reviewed, and the preprint server itself might not provide any barrier to publication. The best approach is to locate a published version of record, and if one does not exist, consider that a potential red flag 🚩.
This guide aims to help researchers identify and avoid questionable research, but it should not be considered legal advice. The final responsibility for any decision lies with the researcher themselves.
