Co-authors of retracted papers suffer serious career consequences

By Marie Lambert-Chan. Even if they’re not implicated, co-authors may see their careers stalled due to another researcher’s misconduct, Quebec study finds. Diederik Stapel, Eric Poehlman, Woo-Suk Hwang, Yoshitaka Fujii: these are individuals who have gone down in history for cheating the scientific system. They misused public funds, put patients’ lives in jeopardy and abused the public’s trust. They also left in their wake dozens of researchers who had unwittingly collaborated in their deception. What happens to the careers of scientists who co-author articles that are later retracted for misconduct?
This question has weighed on the mind of Vincent Larivière, an assistant professor at Université de Montréal’s École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, and master’s student Philippe Mongeon. They studied the career paths of more than 1,700 biomedical and clinical researchers whose names were associated with an article that was retracted for misconduct between 1996 and 2006, but who were not themselves accused of misconduct. The articles had involved fabricated data, falsified data, or plagiarism. The researchers presented their results at the Third World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Montreal in May. More...