Comprehensive Analysis of Retracted Publications in Dentistry: A 23-Year Review

Abstract

Background: In the modern tech-savvy era, scientific literature publication remains the optimal way to disperse knowledge, even if it has transformed from print to mostly electronic. With the new and improved publication methods, also come more scrutiny and analytic criticism of the scientific work. It becomes even more important in this context to rectify flawed scientific work responsibly. This present study was undertaken to help clarify the process and causes of retractions occurring in the dental community and analyse its reasons. Methodology. A total of 8092 PubMed indexed articles were scanned from the online libraries, and individually scanning for author details, place of study, subspecialty of research, funding, dates of original publication, and retraction notices issued along with journal specifics such as type and impact factors, country of publishing was compiled and analysed by two authors. The dataset was then collaboratively analysed using Panda's Library in Python software as an analysis tool for data preparation and for frequency analysis. The estimates were presented as mean differences (MD) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI).

Results: The present study had a compiled dataset of 198 articles after screening and revealed that maximum retractions of dentistry-related research originated from India (25.3%) and, on average, took 2.6 years to be issued a retraction notice. We also deciphered that the USA retracted maximum dental articles (34.8%), and plagiarism was cited as the most common (38.02%) reason for doing so. The present study also brought to light that there was a trend for lower impact factor-dental journals in retracting maximum articles, most of which were nonfunded (62.16%). The results signify that 63.78% of all retracted papers continued to be cited postretractions.

Conclusions: The retractions happening in the field of dental literature are currently too time-consuming and often unclear to the readers. The authors would like to conclude that the retracted papers were mostly from India and Spain mostly related to endodontics or prosthodontic research. All of this warrants the need for better scrutiny and reforms in the area.

Figure 1

Flowchart depicting the steps in the methodology of identification and screening while assimilating the final database of articles. Final n = 198 articles.

Figure 2

Graph showing the time duration between original paper publication and its retraction. N = 198.

Figure 3

Graph showing branch-wise distribution of all dentistry-related retractions. The x-axis shows the discipline where the study was undertaken and y-axis the number of articles retracted.

Figure 4

Graph depicting number of articles retracted from dental journals with impact factors within charted range. N = 89.

Figure 5

The above plotted graph shows the different enlisted causes of retraction (1–8) as per published COPE7 guidelines on the left and other reasons cited by some journals and their numbers on the right.