Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Understanding And Predicting Retractions Of Published Work, Sai Ajay Modukuri, Sarah Rajtmajer, Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recent increases in the number of retractions of published papers reflect heightened attention and increased scrutiny in the scientific process motivated, in part, by the replication crisis. These trends motivate computational tools for understanding and assessment of the scholarly record. Here, we sketch the landscape of retracted papers in the Retraction Watch database, a collection of 19k records of published scholarly articles that have been retracted for various reasons (e.g., plagiarism, data error). Using metadata as well as features derived from full-text for a subset of retracted papers in the social and behavioral sciences, we develop a random forest classifier …