Retractions stigmatize scientific fields, study finds

The study, published this week as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, used the PubMed Related Citations Algorithm (PMRA) to fish out papers that are topically similar to retracted articles but written by different authors. After a retraction, the rate at which these related papers were cited dropped by 5.7% relative to a selection of control papers that were not related to a retraction.

More striking, however, were the estimated effects on funding. PubMed also tracks US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that are acknowledged in publications. This data showed that retractions that undermine the validity of published results, whether owing to fraud or ‘honest’ mistakes such as failure to reproduce the data, were followed by a 50–73% drop in NIH funding for related studies.