In science, as in many fields, credit is the coin of the realm. That credit often comes in the form of citations, an acknowledgement that some other group – or your own, for that matter – came first. In hiring, tenure and promotion decisions, universities prize the h-index and other measures of citation counts. When it comes to retraction notices, however, some publishers would rather refuse credit to those whose efforts made it possible for them to correct the scientific record.
Dozens of sleuths around the world – some focusing on image manipulation, others on plagiarism, statistical anomalies and other issues – have put in countless hours doing painstaking work, driving thousands of retractions and corrections. One could even argue that failing to publicly credit the work of sleuths, with their permission, is a form of plagiarism.
Dozens of retraction notices in Elsevier journals, for instance, have name-checked well-known sleuth Elisabeth Bik, although the practice is not universal there either. Elsewhere, a retraction notice in a Sage journal recently noted that its editors had been "alerted by the authors of [another] recent publication" about potential problems in the paper.
