Speed Poster ESA-SRB-APEG-NZSE 2022

Retractions in paediatric endocrinology: are we failing to regulate the literature? (#71)

Emma O'Sullivan 1 , Allison Lord 1 , Tracy Desborough 1 , Michelle Griffiths 1 , Stewart Birt 1 , Richard G McGee 1 2
  1. Gosford Hospital, Central Coast Local Health District, Hornsby, NSW, Australia
  2. School of Medicine and Public Health, The University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Aims: The quality of the published literature relies heavily on peer-review. Retractions are another method of managing the evidence base and can be used to deal with fraud, scientific misconduct, and serious errors. We aimed to describe the characteristics and rate of retractions in paediatric endocrinology articles.

 

Methods: All publications for the 40 highest ranked endocrinology and diabetes journals in the SCImago Journal Rank database were retrieved from PubMed up to 01/08/2022. The publications were restricted using the paediatric filter (0-18yr) and combined with publication types ‘Retraction of Publication’ OR ‘Retracted Publication’.

 

Results: There were 227,652 publications during this period, of which 35,058 (15.4%) related to paediatrics. Of this cohort, there were 221 retractions in total, of which six were relevant to paediatrics.(1-6) This gives a retraction rate of 9.7 retractions per 10,000 publications for the endocrinology literature and a retraction rate of 1.7 retractions per 10,000 paediatric endocrinology publications. The retracted publications dated between 2002-2015 and together they had been cited a total of 256 times. The corresponding authors came from the USA (n=2), Brazil (n-1), Israel (n=1), Switzerland (n=1), and Turkey (n=1). The reasons for retraction were unreliable data/results (n=3), duplication of data (n=2), misconduct by the author (n=2), methodological error (n=2), and self-plagiarism (n=2).

 

Conclusion: Retractions are an important method of policing the quality of the scientific literature. Compared to the standard 4 retractions for every 10,000 papers in the general medical literature the rate in paediatric endocrinology (1.7/10,000) is below average.(7) This may reflect increased scrutiny and higher standards at the peer-review stage or reduced post-publication peer review.

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