Abstract
I explore trends in retracted publications in life sciences and biomedical sciences. Based on nearly seven thousand publications, which comprise the entirety of retractions visible through PubMed as of August 2019, I perform several analyses to understand trends over different axes, including time, countries, journals and impact factors, and topics. This work involved sophisticated data collection and analysis techniques to use data from PubMed, Wikipedia, and WikiData, and study the publications with respect to these axes. Importantly, I employ state-of-the-art analysis and visualization techniques from natural language processing (NLP) to understand the topics in retracted literature. To highlight a few results, the analyses demonstrate an increasing rate of retraction over time and noticeable differences in the publication quality (as measured by journal impact factors) among top publishing countries. Moreover, while molecular biology dominates retractions, we also see a number of retractions not related to biology. The methods and results of this study can be applied to continuously understand the nature and evolution of retractions in life sciences, thus contributing to the health of this research ecosystem.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.