‘Retract papers based on flawed citations’, urges integrity tsar

Researchers must be more willing to demand the retraction of their own papers if the studies they cite turn out to be fraudulent, says a research integrity champion leading efforts to “decontaminate” scientific literature.

Almost two years after launching a detector tool known as “Feet of Clay”, Guillaume Cabanac, computer science professor at the University of Toulouse, and fellow research sleuths have identified more than 1.1 million research papers referencing about 12,000 annulled studies, many already known to be problematic when they were included in bibliographies.

In a recent case highlighting the project’s impact, a book chapter on lung cancer published by a Springer Nature journal in November was retracted two months later for citing 64 studies that had been retracted or subjected to an expression of concern.

“As a result, the statements that are supported by these references should no longer be considered reliable,” explains the retraction notice published last month, adding the “editors no longer have confidence in the overall reliability of this chapter”.

The Iran-based authors of the chapter in Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology disagree with the decision, the notice adds.

“Every knowledge brick used in a study has to be as robust as possible,” Cabanac told Times Higher Education. “When these retracted papers are used as bricks of knowledge, you are in trouble because the entire foundation of your work is sand, not rock,” he added.

Removing these papers from the ecosystem – or at least highlighting their questionable citations – is vital because, without their retraction, future researchers risk using unsound results and techniques, said Cabanac.

“If you’ve based your entire publication and research design on a flawed study that relies on retracted papers then you’re in big trouble. You might spend three or four years on a PhD that doesn’t work so you lose time, effort, the confidence of peers and you waste public money,” said Cabanac, whose chair is funded by a five-year fellowship from the Institut Universitaire de France (the equivalent of the UK’s Royal Society) with the explicit aim of the “decontamination of scientific literature”.

Papers identified by the Feet of Clay project, whose name references a biblical story about a great statue built on weak foundations, often cite work by prolific research fraudsters such as Japanese scientist Yoshitaka Fujii, who had almost 200 papers retracted because of scientific misconduct and data fabrication in the 1990s and 2000s, explained Cabanac.

Yet researchers remain reluctant to push for retractions of papers citing studies in which fraud is beyond doubt, insisting that they referenced the work in good faith at the time, he said. Many also fear the stigma of having a retracted paper against their name given the implication of direct wrongdoing.

Those worries about reputation and personal pride must take second place to preserving the integrity of scientific literature, Cabanac insisted. “We have an evolving base of knowledge and papers are retracted every day – that doesn’t mean the knowledge was wrong when it was cited,” he said.

Academic publishers should also make greater efforts to remove papers citing multiple retracted studies, continued Cabanac.

“This is something I find infuriating – publishers should be accountable for what appears in their books, journals and conference papers. They should be constantly reassessing their materials and removing them when problems arise…but I know of no publisher which has set up a task force to check the bibliographies of the work they publish and sell,” he said.

“It’s difficult to do but I have done the work for them,” he said, referring to the publicly available cache of data on his Problematic Paper Screener portal established in February 2021.

Cabanac is arguably best known for pioneering the use of “tortured phrases” to spot jarring or nonsensical phrases in research papers – a fraud-spotting tool that has successfully identified thousands of papers written by paper mills.

Yet Feet of Clay’s efforts to find papers citing retracted studies will be far more significant to detecting suspect papers, he insists. “We’ve found about 25,000 papers with five or more tortured phrases, though that’s only about 3 per cent of all the papers we’ve identified with this technique,” he said.

“Feet of Clay will have much more impact – we’ve found 1.12 million papers so far and that number will only grow,” he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com