Misconduct not mistakes are the chief reason chemistry papers are retracted
Analysis prompts call for publishers to be more open about the reasons a paper is withdrawn
Most retracted chemistry papers are removed from the literature as a result academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and falsified data, rather than ‘honest mistakes’, a study of retractions in 2017 and 2018 has shown.
François-Xavier Coudert, a theoretical chemist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, used Elsevier’s Scopus database to identify 331 retracted papers in chemistry or materials science, and analysed the reasons given in the retraction notices. Of these, 139 (42%) cited…