Retractions of scientific articles are becoming the most relevant institution for making sense of scientific misconduct. An increasing number of retracted articles, mainly attributed to misconduct, is currently providing a new empirical basis for research about scientific misconduct. This article reviews the relevant research literature from an interdisciplinary context. Furthermore, the results from these studies are contextualized sociologically by asking how scientific misconduct is made visible through retractions. This study treats retractions as an emerging institution that renders scientific misconduct visible, thus, following up on the sociology of deviance and its focus on visibility. The article shows that retractions, by highlighting individual cases of misconduct and general policies for preventing misconduct while obscuring the actors and processes through which retractions are effected, produce highly fragmented patterns of visibility. These patterns resemble the bifurcation in current justice systems.

Sanctions for plagiarism, falsification and fabrication in research are primarily symbolic. This paper investigates sanctions for scientific misconduct and their preceding investigation processes as visible and legitimate symbols. Using three different data sources (retraction notices, expert interviews, and a survey of scientists), we show that sanctions for scientific misconduct operate within a cycle of visibility, in which sanctions are highly visible, while investigation and decision-making procedures remain mostly invisible. This corresponds to high levels of acceptance of sanctions in the scientific community, but a low acceptance of the respective authorities. Such a punitiveness in turn exacerbates confidentiality concerns, so that authorities become even more secretive. We argue that punitiveness towards scientific misconduct is driven by such a cycle of invisibility.

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The present article is concerned with the symbolism of punishment, using sanctions for scientific misconduct as an exemplary case. By looking at a case not traditionally an object for criminology, it seeks to extend existing cultural theories of punishment to incorporate settings that are not defined by penal law but that nonetheless feature phenomena of deviance and punishment. The article outlines how sanctions for misconduct, much like state punishment, appeal to themes of sacred and evil, uncertainty and disorder. It argues that this appeal to the sacred is both symbolic and instrumental, in that it serves to create and legitimize a position of authority for the journals taking action against scientific misconduct, illustrating how symbolic aspects of punishment relate to aspects of power.

Retractions of journal articles exclude fraudulent or erroneous research from legitimate science and perform boundary work. Analyzing retractions from different disciplines and focusing on their apologetic aspects, we find that these apologies shift between openly addressing emotional, normative, and social themes and concealing them in a more scientific style of communication. Their boundary work remains highly ambivalent: They alternate between scientific and nonscientific forms of speaking, portray unstable patterns of control and coercion, and avoid drawing a boundary between legitimate and nonlegitimate science. In line with the hypothetical nature of scientific knowledge, retractions thus leave boundary making to the future.

Academic publishing is undergoing profound changes that shape the conditions of knowledge production and the way research is communicated, prompting a lively debate on how the various activities of those involved can be adequately acknowledged in publications. This contribution aims to empirically examine the relationship between authorship regulations in journal policies, the disciplinary variance in authorship practice and larger concepts of academic authorship. Analyzing (1) editorial policies and (2) data from an interdisciplinary survey of scientists, we examine to what extent disciplinary variances are reflected in the policies as well as in researchers' individual understandings. Here we find that the regulation of authorship qua policies is primarily effected at the level of the publishers. Although considerable disciplinary variations of journal policies are sometimes suggested in the literature, we find only minor differences in authorship criteria. The survey data however show that researchers' understandings of authorship exhibit significant, discipline-specific differences, as well as differences related to the characteristics of the research practice. It hence becomes clear that discipline-specific conditions of knowledge production with the resulting differences in authorship practices are hardly reflected in authorship policies. We conclude that the regulatory ambitions of authorship policies mostly focus on the prevention and elimination of deficits in the quality and integrity of scientific publications. Thus, it seems questionable whether authorship policies in their current form are suitable instruments for mediating between diverse authorship practices and normative ideals of legitimate authorship.

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Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review. These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production. As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted. We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production.