The explosion of retractions, or withdrawals, of scientific articles is a growing reality in Swiss research, with 304 cases recorded since the 1990s, the majority dating back to recent years. For experts, this increase reflects increased rigor more than a lack of reliability. Some cases are nevertheless worrying.
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Infographics.
Accept More info
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Infographics.
Accept More info
Swiss research is not spared from this phenomenon, according to an analysis of the Retraction Watch database by the RTS. The number of retractions of research carried out by Swiss teams – including in international collaboration – follows a similar curve to the world average, for a total of 304 retractions since 1991. More than three-quarters of the retractions took place during the ten recent years. The year 2022 was the most important, with 32 searches affected.
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Infographics.
Accept More info
Lots of articles on health
No less than 143 retractions, or almost half of the corpus, concern research related to health or medicine. This does not surprise Guillaume Levrier, political science researcher specializing in biotechnologies and member of the NanoBubbles network, which tracks scientific errors and fraud.
“Research in the biomedical field is based on methods of administering scientific proof which are historically easy to distort and difficult to invalidate, short of gross falsifications,” the researcher begins by recalling.
“We only detect the falsifications of people who falsify badly. Modifying a graph in Photoshop will be seen quite easily. Modifying the algorithms that take data from one measuring instrument to falsify it before it is captured by another system to generate the graph is almost undetectable.”
Guillaume Levrier believes that the biomedical field is in reality not necessarily more affected than the others. “A lot of studies in other types of sciences, for example in the social sciences, are probably problematic. These are fields that publish less, have different methodological and epistemological practices and potentially cheat less badly.”
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Infographics.
Accept More info
Plagiarism of John Paul II
The prize for the number of Swiss retractions goes to a researcher from the University of Lugano, with six papers withdrawn, seven corrected and one raising concerns. Most cases fall under plagiarism issues. A ticket they blog from Retraction Watch tells us that the researcher in question notably plagiarized Pope John Paul II in one of his papers.
The pressure to publish, omnipresent in the scientific world, can lead to fraud. “Either you are a hyper-publisher, you absolutely want to publish, or you are incapable of rising to the height of the required knowledge,” explained Michelle Bergadaà, professor of management at the University of Geneva, in the RTS show 36.9°. .
>> Read also: Scientific fraud, a growing scourge that threatens the integrity of research
However, not all errors are intentional and the majority of researchers follow an honest approach. But if the fraudsters are few in number, they are generally prolific, notes Solal Prielli, doctor in computer science, graduate of EPFL, who tracks scientific fraud in his free time. The majority of errors he discovers are the work of fraudsters.
Combination of reasons
It is therefore interesting to focus on the reasons for the retractions of Swiss productions, data which is also compiled by Retraction Watch. Many criteria are taken into account, ranging from simple error to ethical problem. In particular, there are 105 papers with proven errors (in the data, in the images, in the analysis) and 90 cases where the scientists’ work raises questions. There were also 28 cases of plagiarism as well as 18 falsifications.
Most of the time, the withdrawal is motivated by a combination of reasons. In this regard, we can cite a study on the recovery of patients who received ketamine during cardiac operations, published in 2019, and in which a team from Langenthal hospital (BE) participated. She was removed the same year for ethical violations, lack of authorization and improper conduct of the investigation.
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Infographics.
Accept More info
Prestigious journals
Among the journals with the most retractions are big names, which have significant influence in their field of research. The famous journal Science, with 14 retractions, is thus the second journal to have published the most Swiss research which was subsequently retracted.
“If journals pride themselves on having an excellent selection process and being prestigious, it is abnormal for poor quality or completely fraudulent studies to be published,” continues Lonni Besançon.
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Infographics.
Accept More info
Protocols in question
It would be wrong to consider Swiss research as less and less reliable, says Katharina Froom, member of the Chamber of Universities of swissuniversities and rector of the University of Fribourg. On the contrary, the increase in retractions can, according to her, be proof of a certain scientific health.
“Retractions can be seen as an example of how the scientific system works, as dictated by the principle ‘science is self-corrective'[[la science s’auto-corrige, ndlr]. In a certain way, retractions can play a role in the visibility of negative results.” Katharina Froom notes that the increase in publications observed in recent years also automatically leads to an increase in retractions.
We can nevertheless wonder whether the protocols for verifying results before publication should not be strengthened, in order to eliminate as many errors as possible. For Andreas Mortensen, this would be counterproductive: “the cost in work and slowdown would be much greater than the gain in rigor.”
For her part, Katharina Froom explains that the issue can only be resolved through international cooperation. “Swissuniversities is part of international initiatives, such as DORA or CoARA, which aim to broaden the evaluation criteria beyond quantitative indicators to include, among others, Open Science and societal impact.”
Antoine Schaub
