Research done wrong: A comprehensive investigation of retracted publications in COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the publishing of a quantity of scientific research. In less than a year, a record of 200,000 scientific articles have been published on COVID-19. Publishing such a massive quantity of scientific research has instigated publishers to accelerate the review process. An upsurge in the publication rate has resulted in an increase in the retraction rate. This paper focuses on the COVID-19 studies originating across the world from 1 January 2020 to 10 October 2021. The data for this study were mined from http://retractiondatabase.org/. A total of 157 withdrawn articles on COVID-19 were retracted, and it was found that the United States of America contributed 31 (19.75%) retracted articles. Also, 16 (51.61%) of the retracted papers from the United States of America emerge in journals having an Impact Factor (IF). The study presents that 31 (19.75%) retracted articles were worked together by two authors, 26 (16.56%) with one author, and 22 (14.01%) by five authors. Furthermore, Elsevier publishers have the highest retraction rate with 80 (50.96%). Half (50%) of the articles were retracted with “no information” as a reason for retraction. Other reasons for retraction include concern/issues about data, duplication, journal error, lack of approval from a third party, plagiarism, etc.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• pandemic
• research misconduct
• retractions
• journal impact factor
• scientific research

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for the valuable suggestions and comments, which helped improve the quality of the original manuscript.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.