IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v115y2018i3d10.1007_s11192-018-2720-z.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An analysis of Malaysian retracted papers: Misconduct or mistakes?

Author

Listed:
  • M. K. Yanti Idaya Aspura

    (University of Malaya)

  • A. Noorhidawati

    (University of Malaya)

  • A. Abrizah

    (University of Malaya)

Abstract

Retracted publications are a crucial, yet overlooked, issue in the scientific community. The purpose of this study was to analyze the prevalence, characteristics and reasons of Malaysian retracted papers. The Web of Science and Scopus databases were queried to identify Malaysian retracted publications. Available versions of original articles and publication notices were accessed from journal websites. The publications were assessed for various characteristics, including reason for retraction, based on the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines, and the authority calling for the retractions. From 2009 to June 2017, 125 Malaysian publications comprising (33 journal articles and 92 conference papers) were retracted. There was a spike in the prevalence of retracted articles in 2010 and 2012 with 42 articles (33.6%) and 41 articles (32.8%) respectively from the 125 retracted articles. The mean time from electronic publication to retraction was 1 year. There is no significant relationship between a journal quartile and the mean number of months to retraction (P = 0.842). The reason for retraction for conference papers was specified as “violation of publication principle”. Journal articles were retracted mainly for duplicate publication, plagiarism, compromised peer review process, and self-plagiarism. Most retracted articles do not contain flawed data; and only 2 retracted articles have been accused of scientific mistakes. The study concludes that retractions were mostly due to the authors misconduct. Despite the increases, the proportion of published scholarly literature affected by retraction remains very small, indicating that retraction represents an uncommon, yet potentially increasing and incipient, issue within Malaysian papers, which publishers as well as editors may have consistently and sufficiently addressed.

Suggested Citation

  • M. K. Yanti Idaya Aspura & A. Noorhidawati & A. Abrizah, 2018. "An analysis of Malaysian retracted papers: Misconduct or mistakes?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(3), pages 1315-1328, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:115:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-018-2720-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-018-2720-z
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-018-2720-z
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-018-2720-z?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hendrik P. van Dalen & Kène Henkens, 2012. "Intended and unintended consequences of a publish‐or‐perish culture: A worldwide survey," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(7), pages 1282-1293, July.
    2. Hendrik P. van Dalen & Kène Henkens, 2012. "Intended and unintended consequences of a publish‐or‐perish culture: A worldwide survey," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(7), pages 1282-1293, July.
    3. Richard Van Noorden, 2011. "Science publishing: The trouble with retractions," Nature, Nature, vol. 478(7367), pages 26-28, October.
    4. Daniele Fanelli, 2010. "Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists' Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(4), pages 1-7, April.
    5. Furman, Jeffrey L. & Jensen, Kyle & Murray, Fiona, 2012. "Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 276-290.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. José Luis Ortega & Lorena Delgado-Quirós, 2024. "The indexation of retracted literature in seven principal scholarly databases: a coverage comparison of dimensions, OpenAlex, PubMed, Scilit, Scopus, The Lens and Web of Science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(7), pages 3769-3785, July.
    2. Tariq Ahmad Shah & Sumeer Gul & Saimah Bashir & Suhail Ahmad & Assumpció Huertas & Andrea Oliveira & Farzana Gulzar & Ashaq Hussain Najar & Kanu Chakraborty, 2021. "Influence of accessibility (open and toll-based) of scholarly publications on retractions," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4589-4606, June.
    3. Istvan-Szilard Szilagyi & Gregor A. Schittek & Christoph Klivinyi & Holger Simonis & Torsten Ulrich & Helmar Bornemann-Cimenti, 2022. "Citation of retracted research: a case-controlled, ten-year follow-up scientometric analysis of Scott S. Reuben’s malpractice," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(5), pages 2611-2620, May.
    4. Bakthavachalam Elango, 2022. "Characteristics of retracted editorial articles in the biomedical literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(3), pages 1431-1438, March.
    5. Shenghui Li & Wenyan Xu & Jingqi Yin, 2023. "Cross-cultural differences in retracted publications of male and female from a global perspective," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(7), pages 3805-3826, July.
    6. Bakthavachalam Elango & Marcin Kozak & Periyaswamy Rajendran, 2019. "Analysis of retractions in Indian science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 1081-1094, May.
    7. Qin Zhang & Juneman Abraham & Hui-Zhen Fu, 2020. "Collaboration and its influence on retraction based on retracted publications during 1978–2017," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(1), pages 213-232, October.
    8. Ali Ghorbi & Mohsen Fazeli-Varzaneh & Erfan Ghaderi-Azad & Marcel Ausloos & Marcin Kozak, 2021. "Retracted papers by Iranian authors: causes, journals, time lags, affiliations, collaborations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7351-7371, September.
    9. Bakthavachalam Elango, 2021. "Retracted articles in the biomedical literature from Indian authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(5), pages 3965-3981, May.
    10. Behzad Gholampour & Sajad Gholampour & Alireza Noruzi & Clément Arsenault & Thomas Haertlé & Ali Akbar Saboury, 2022. "Retracted articles in oncology in the last three decades: frequency, reasons, and themes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(4), pages 1841-1865, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dell'Anno, Roberto & Caferra, Rocco & Morone, Andrea, 2020. "A “Trojan Horse” in the peer-review process of fee-charging economic journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    2. Abramo, Giovanni & D'Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea & Grilli, Leonardo, 2021. "The effects of citation-based research evaluation schemes on self-citation behavior," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).
    3. Joeri K Tijdink & Anton C M Vergouwen & Yvo M Smulders, 2013. "Publication Pressure and Burn Out among Dutch Medical Professors: A Nationwide Survey," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(9), pages 1-6, September.
    4. Daniele Fanelli & Vincent Larivière, 2016. "Researchers’ Individual Publication Rate Has Not Increased in a Century," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(3), pages 1-12, March.
    5. Hendrik P. Dalen, 2021. "How the publish-or-perish principle divides a science: the case of economists," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1675-1694, February.
    6. Daniele Fanelli & Rodrigo Costas & Vincent Larivière, 2015. "Misconduct Policies, Academic Culture and Career Stage, Not Gender or Pressures to Publish, Affect Scientific Integrity," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(6), pages 1-18, June.
    7. van Dalen, Hendrik Peter, 2021. "How the publish-or-perish principle divides a science: The case of economists," Other publications TiSEM a6a5a855-bb5a-4d52-a841-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    8. Mark D Lindner & Richard K Nakamura, 2015. "Examining the Predictive Validity of NIH Peer Review Scores," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(6), pages 1-12, June.
    9. José María Cavero & Belén Vela & Paloma Cáceres, 2014. "Computer science research: more production, less productivity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(3), pages 2103-2111, March.
    10. Michael Carolan, 2024. "Do universities support solutions-oriented collaborative research? Constraints to wicked problems scholarship in higher education," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-12, December.
    11. Hendrik P. van Dalen, 2019. "Values of Economists Matter in the Art and Science of Economics," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 72(3), pages 472-499, August.
    12. Horbach, S.P.J.M.(Serge) & Halffman, W.(Willem), 2019. "The extent and causes of academic text recycling or ‘self-plagiarism’," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 492-502.
    13. Patricia Laurens & Christian Le Bas & Linh-Chi Vo, 2024. "Evolution of academic research in French business schools (2008-2018): isomorphism and heterogeneity," Post-Print hal-04666299, HAL.
    14. Tony Ross-Hellauer & Thomas Klebel & Petr Knoth & Nancy Pontika, 2024. "Value dissonance in research(er) assessment: individual and perceived institutional priorities in review, promotion, and tenure," Science and Public Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 51(3), pages 337-351.
    15. Stephan Puehringer & Georg Wolfmayr, 2023. "Competitive Performativity of (Academic) Social Networks. The subjectivation of Competition on ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Twitter," ICAE Working Papers 150, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.
    16. David Pontille & Didier Torny, 2013. "Behind the scenes of scientific articles: defining categories of fraud and regulating cases," CSI Working Papers Series 031, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI), Mines ParisTech.
    17. Bruno S. Frey, 2021. "Backward‐oriented economics," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 74(2), pages 187-195, May.
    18. Ben Purvis & Hannah Keding & Ashley Lewis & Phil Northall, 2023. "Critical reflections of postgraduate researchers on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-13, December.
    19. Antonio Fernandez-Cano, 2021. "Letter to the Editor: publish, publish … cursed!," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 3673-3682, April.
    20. Salandra, Rossella, 2018. "Knowledge dissemination in clinical trials: Exploring influences of institutional support and type of innovation on selective reporting," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(7), pages 1215-1228.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:115:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-018-2720-z. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.