Retraction policies: standardization

Comment on Resnik DB, Wager E, Kissling GE. Retraction policies of top scientific journals ranked by impact factor. J Med Libr Assoc. 2015 Jul;103(3):136–9. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.103.3.006.

To the editor, the recent article by Resnik et al. is very interesting [1]. Resnik et al. mentioned that “the majority of journals in this sample had a retraction policy, and almost all of them would retract an article without the authors' permission” [1]. In fact, it is no doubt that there is a high rate of scientific misconduct. Several problematic publications can be seen, and a method to manage the unethical article is to retract it. As noted by Banerjee, the retraction note is an effective method to promote practice against plagiarism [2]. However, the retraction might be done in several ways. Some journals might retract the article with published retraction note; whereas, some journals retract the article without any note. The effect of different practices should be further studied. Also, different practices raise a new question of the standardization for problem detection, determination, and management. A recent publication by Resnik can be a good example challenging the requirement for standardization among journals in managing problematic unethical publications [3].