Scientists oppose retractions for racism, sexism and fraud

Scientists are strongly opposed to the retraction of articles by authors who have committed sexual harassment or financial misconduct, or have made racist remarks, according to a survey.

To examine attitudes towards retractions for non-academic reasons, researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi asked 464 academics whether an author should have their work pulled from the scientific literature if they had been found to have made racist or sexist comments towards a graduate student, or they had misused research funds.

In all cases, the respondents disagreed that these misdeeds should result in the loss of scientific papers, according to an article published this month in the Journal for Academic Ethics.

However, the survey found higher levels of support for retracting work by those found guilty of grant funding misuse than for those who had made racist or sexist comments, though a clear majority were still opposed to retraction.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, the study’s lead author, August Namuth, a graduate assistant at his university’s Office for Research Integrity, said the elevated level of support for retraction for financial fraud might be because participants “inferred that if the researcher was willing to engage in financially fraudulent behaviour with grant money, they may be more willing to engage in actual research misconduct that would undermine the validity of the research findings”.

The study follows the removal of several scholarly articles for extra-scientific reasons in recent years, with papers pulled from the literature after it emerged that authors had been convicted of murder, sexual assault or possessing indecent images of children. A paper was removed from a leading engineering journal in 2017 after one of its authors was revealed to be a former president of Iran known for making antisemitic comments who had subsequently returned to academia.

Academics’ reticence to retract work produced by those with objectionable characters was probably because they were “formally and informally trained to judge work solely on its quality”, said Mr Namuth, who also pointed to “very formal guidelines” from the Council on Publication Ethics that “emphasise research should only be retracted if the veracity of the findings is seriously compromised or called into question”.

But it might also reflect a “cost-benefit analysis” on behalf of scientists willing to accept high-quality science even if it was pioneered by those with objectionable views or characters, he added.

If scientists had sought, for example, to remove the work of the famous 20th-century British statistician Ronald Fisher on the grounds that he was an “outspoken eugenicist”, this would have “served to significantly slow the pace of reliably evaluating scientific findings”.

Many of these determinations on how to use work from such individuals “may boil down to a cost-benefits analysis that can vary from person to person”, Mr Namuth said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com