Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine
Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine
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DOI：
10.1016/j.respol.2011.11.001
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发表时间：
2012-03-01
期刊：
影响因子：
7.2
通讯作者：
Murray, Fiona
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Furman, Jeffrey L.;Jensen, Kyle;Murray, Fiona
虽然知识的有效性对科学进步至关重要，但对知识生产的管理存在重大关切。虽然研究错误与知识经济的相关性不亚于缺陷与制造业经济的相关性，但人们对识别和发出“缺陷”或虚假知识信号的机制却知之甚少。在本文中，我们调查这样一个制度-科学撤回制度。我们分析了1972年至2006年之间从生物医学文献中撤回的同行评议的科学文章，并与匹配的对照样本进行比较，以确定科学撤回的相关性，时间和因果关系。这项工作提供了深入了解的分布式，基于同行的系统的有效性在科学知识的治理工作。我们的研究结果表明，注意力是撤回的一个关键预测因素-撤回的文章最常出现在高引用的文章中。撤回系统在发现被确定为错误的知识方面是迅速的（撤回的平均时间不到两年）和民主的（撤回不受作者知名度的系统性影响）。最后，撤回会导致未来引用的立即，严重和长期下降。有条件的明显限制，我们不能衡量流通中的虚假科学的绝对数量，这些结果支持这样的观点，即分布式治理系统可以被设计为相对迅速地发现虚假知识，并减轻未来几代生产者的虚假知识的成本。(C)2011 Elsevier B. V.保留所有权利。
Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While research errors are as relevant to the knowledge economy as defects are to the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal "defective" or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution - the system of scientific retractions. We analyze the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample in order to identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions. This effort provides insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction - retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to uncover false knowledge relatively swiftly and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.