“Research exceptionalism” in the COVID-19 pandemic: an analysis of scientific retractions in Scopus

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to outline the profile of retractions of scientific articles on COVID-19 published in journals indexed in the Scopus database between 2020 and 2021. To analyze the data, we used a bibliometric technique, with the Bibliometrix package in the R-Studio software, and descriptive statistics. Twenty-nine retractions were analyzed, and we found that the most common reasons for retraction were related to ethical issues and that 68.97% of authors have previously retracted articles. We concluded that there appears to have been a change in the publication policies of journals, which resulted in an increase in scientific retractions related to COVID-19 during the study period.

KEYWORDS:

• Retraction
• science integrity
• misconduct
• covid-19
• pandemic

Acknowledgments

This study was financed in part by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). The authors are also grateful to the research laboratory “Organizations and Society” of the Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR) –Ponta Grossa Campus.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ Author Local Impact: local citations measure how many times an author included in this portfolio have been cited by other authors also in the portfolio (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2020).