The Hill published this warning from an Information Sciences assistant professor:
Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds… Yet these zombie publications continue to be cited and used, unwittingly, to support new arguments. Why? Almost always it’s because nobody noticed they had been retracted…
Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage. For the scientific record to be a record of the best available knowledge, we need to take a knowledge maintenance perspective on the scholarly literature… And we need to build on that knowledge, not on the errors and fraud…
Slow science, living articles and reducing the pressure to publish are among the interventions that could help. We need a healthy, trustworthy ecosystem that rewards effort, not just results… Individuals and organizations that do the work of science must ensure that the work doesn’t end at publication. Sometimes, it is just the beginning.
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