How to deal with the fallout of bad science?
Abstract: Errors and fraud can have an outsized impact on science, when future work uses or cites the "bad science". The retraction process removes "bad science" from the literature. But some retracted papers are still cited and used. My Information Quality lab has used text and network analysis to analyze how retracted papers continue to spread through citation. For example, a fraudulent clinical trial report has been cited for 11+ years after it was retracted for falsifying data. Authors often unknowingly cite retracted papers - in our large-scale study from PubMed Central's open access XML subset, less than 3% of authors who cite already-retracted papers mentioned the retraction. I will describe an ongoing Sloan-funded stakeholder engagement involving 70 people from across scholarly communication which is developing a research and implementation agenda to reduce the inadvertent spread of retracted science.
Questions? Contact Emily Knox
Bio: Jodi Schneider is assistant professor of information science. Her work relates to the sociology of knowledge and uses approaches from science of science, argumentation, knowledge representation, and computer supported collaboration to contribute to biomedical informatics, information quality, and evidence synthesis.
This event is sponsored by IS 400 Colloquium