Retraction of articles by scientific journal editors – the signal that an already published article has flaws large enough to be deemed invalid – has seen a significant rise over the past decade, peaking in 2023 with more than 10,000 items retracted. The field of ophthalmology is not immune to this major trend, as demonstrated by a study published in the journal Helion.
Yosra Er-reguyeg, doctoral student in medicine and master’s student-researcher in biomedical sciences at Laval University, Frédéric Mouriaux, associate professor of ophthalmology at the Faculty of Medicine and researcher at the Research Center of the CHU de Québec – University Laval, and Christophe Boudry, from Rennes University Hospital, demonstrated this by finding, using the PubMed database, all the articles retracted between 1966 and 2023 in the field of ophthalmology.
During this period, 544,472 articles were published in this area. Of these, 151 articles, published in 91 journals, were retracted. The reasons given by the editors for retracting these articles are multiple. Data falsification comes first with 38% of cases. This is followed by honest errors too important to be corrected by the publication of an erratum (23%), disputes between authors concerning the signature of the article (9%), plagiarism (7%) and duplication of publication (7%).
Analyzes carried out by the research team show that the number of articles retracted annually remained below 5 until 2011. The annual average then increased to 6.6 between 2011 and 2019, before jumping to 23 for the period 2020-2022.
“The withdrawals made during these three years alone represent 45% of the total,” observes Yosra Er-reguyeg. We don’t know if the upward trend we’ve seen is because there is more fraud and error on the part of scientists, if there has been a relaxation of the peer review process during the COVID-19 pandemic or if editors and the scientific community are better at detecting problematic articles.
It takes some time to ferret out problem items. A little more than half (52%) of retractions occur more than two years after the article was published. In 9% of cases, articles “live” at least 10 years before being retracted.
Good scientific publishing rules are that retracted articles remain in publishers’ databases and websites, but they must be very prominently identified as having been retracted. “We found that 21% of retracted articles are not correctly labeled for this purpose on the scientific journals’ websites,” emphasizes Yosra Er-reguyeg.
“The consequence is that these articles circulate for a long time, are cited in other publications, propagate errors in the scientific community and in society and can lead to clinical decisions that risk harming the quality of care provided to patients,” underlines Professor Mouriaux.
— Frédéric Mouriaux
Retracting an article is not a problem in itself, he continues. “In fact, it is a solution to different problems, the most common of which are scientific fraud and honest mistakes. Tightening the peer review process would help prevent some of the good faith mistakes, but dishonesty is hard to stop. »
Papers retracted each year represent just 0.2% of all papers published annually, but they nonetheless constitute a thorn in the side of science. If nothing better, retraction remains the best tool to stop the damage that scientific articles containing erroneous information can cause. Unfortunately, publishers do not engage with this act of contrition with equal enthusiasm.
“Any retracted article must be clearly labeled as such on the publisher’s website as well as in the bibliographic databases,” insists Professor Mouriaux. It is essential that this exercise be done rigorously to prevent these articles from contaminating the knowledge on which science is built. »
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