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In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 200 articles related to SARS-CoV-2 were retracted—yet many of the articles continued to be cited.
That’s one reason why Jodi Schneider, associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is leading a project to prevent the spread of retracted research. She was recently awarded a $249,998 grant to continue her work to create consistent community practices for publishers, preprint repositories, and discovery services to identify and signal that publications have been retracted or have expressions of concern.
The two-year project, “Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science II: Research and Development towards the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern,” is intended to reduce the real and perceived danger to science and society when retracted research is mistakenly circulated within the digital scholarly record.
Schneider’s research group will compare the quality and availability of retraction metadata in multidisciplinary sources such as Crossref, the RetractionWatch Database, Scopus, and Web of Science. They will determine whether library subject databases and popular search engines indicate retraction status. The group will also study the impact of code and dataset retraction, and identify use cases for retraction information, drawing upon examples of both poorly and well-disseminated retraction metadata.
Ultimately, the project will identify parties involved in the retraction process and describe their responsibilities, actions and notification methods. The researchers will also propose best practices for populating retraction-related metadata and communicating an item’s status and visibility, using publication, conference outreach, and virtual vendor/supplier and editor training to distribute the alerts.
Schneider, who studies the science of science through the lens of arguments, evidence and persuasion, says the goal of her research is to design systems that can support sound, science-based policy making.
Information provided by University of Illinois.
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