Engineering Literature Retractions: Applications to Scholarly Communications Training

This study presents the preliminary results of an investigation of retracted publications in the engineering literature to identify scholarly communications topics that librarians need to address in instruction settings.We used Elsevier's Scopus abstract and citation database to collect engineering publications marked as "retracted articles" as of November 2019.We found that the most common reasons for retraction were plagiarism and authorship issues, while copyright infringement, errors, and lack of reproducible results were less common.The results of this study will be of particular interest to educators teaching scholarly communications practices to engineering graduate students by illustrating the common mistakes found in the engineering literature.