Abstract
Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva and Aceil Al-Khatib (2019) Ending the retraction stigma: Encouraging the reporting of errors in the biomedical record. Research Ethics. DOI: 10.1177/1747016118802970
Editor’s Note first published online: July 28, 2019
Editor’s Note updated: October 24, 2019
In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that author Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva has been the subject of multiple posts on the Retraction Watch blog. Furthermore, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva did initially propose to include the following conflict of interest statement but the article was published without including it:
‘The first author has been profiled at or by Retraction Watch and PubPeer, and was banned from commenting by Leonid Schneider at his blog “forbetterscience”.’
Each of these websites is critically referenced by the authors in the article. Further, readers are alerted to the fact that Jamie A. Teixeira da Silva has in the past been credited on the Retraction Watch website for alerting the website of multiple retracted articles.
The editor additionally wishes to clarify that as a “Topic Piece”, this paper is an opinion piece. The views expressed do not reflect the views of the journal, editor, or publisher, but are intended to form a review, snapshot of, or perspective on contemporary thinking on a topic or issue.
Update October 2019
While there is scope for articles to offer critical interpretation, especially when engaging in some disciplinary methods such as sociological analysis, the specific factual claim below was not substantiated and lacked reference to any publicly available evidence:
“Retraction Watch concocted a category it referred to as “doing the right thing”6, but that quickly degenerated into a politically-driven campaign that gave preference to some cases over others, and was arguably biased by subjective criteria of that blog’s ownership as to what constitutes “the right thing” or honesty, without any possibility of input or influence from the relevant public.”
6. http://retractionwatch.com/category/by-reason-for-retraction/doing-the-right-thing/