Clustered Distribution of Retraction Reasons in Scholarly Articles and Disciplinary Differences: Based on from the Retraction Watch Database

Key Points

• The study aims to analyze the co-occurrence of retraction reasons in scholarly articles across different disciplines.
• Conducted clustering analysis based on the Retraction Watch Database, involving 12,841 retracted articles.
• Categorized articles into five fields: Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Life Sciences, and Medicine.
• Analyzed the network structure of retraction reasons to identify disciplinary differences.
• In Humanities, 'plagiarism' was a prominent retraction reason.
• Social Sciences and Engineering showed 'paper mills' and 'fake peer reviews' as major causes.
• In Medicine, the lack of 'patient consent' was identified as a critical ethical issue.