Are retraction notices becoming clearer?

Retraction notices issued by scholarly journals have, to an extent, become clearer over time, a new analysis suggests. The authors of the study examined 768 retraction notices issued by journals run by the publishing giants Springer Nature and Wiley in 2010, 2015, and 2020 ( Account. Res. 2023, DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2024.2366281 ). They obtained retraction records from the Retraction Watch Database , which contains more than 49,000 retractions to date. The researchers used retraction guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics and recommendations from the research integrity blog Retraction Watch to rate retraction notices. Two authors of the study are affiliated with Retraction Watch. The authors judged retraction notices using criteria including whether notices were freely available and easily accessible, whether they mentioned investigations carried out by journals or institutions, and whether they were candid about the reasons for retraction. The study authors also checked if notices specified whether the