A survey of retracted articles in the three high-impact journals

Abstract

Objectives: The effect of a retracted publication can be significant, especially in high-impact journals. We aimed to identify the characteristics of retracted articles in three high-impact clinical journals, including The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).Methods: The Retraction Watch database was searched from inception to March 21, 2021. Data collected for each article included title, article type, reasons for retraction, journal, publisher, publication year, retraction year, first author, country of origin, and times a retracted article was cited. Data analysis was performed by GraphPad Prism version 8.00 (La Jolla, CA, United States), and SPSS Statistics 26.0. Results: A total of 77 articles were retracted, of which 20 were from JAMA, 31 from Lancet, and 26 from NEJM. Over one-half of papers were retracted within the last decade (n=44, 57.1%). Since 2005, the number of retracted articles had increased dramatically. The United States (n=29, 37.7%) was the country with the highest number of retracted publications in the three journals, followed by the United Kingdom (n=9, 11.7%) and China (n=5, 6.5%). The most common reasons for retractions were “Error” (n=20, 26.0%), “Fraud” (n=19, 24.7%) and “Reliability” (n=18, 23.4%) in these three journals. The media number of citations was 79 (range 0-2677). The media time to retraction was 651 (range 2-8474) days. The time was longer when an article was retracted because of fraud than that because of error. Conclusions: By analyzing the features of retracted articles in the three high-impact journals, we could identify the reason for retraction more comprehensively and benefit in improving the quality of biomedical literature.