Chemistry journals take just under 3 years to retract papers plagued with self-plagiarism, according to a new analysis.
The study was published by Accountability in Research earlier this month. It found that biological science journals took the longest time to retract papers with self-plagiarism, 3.8 years, while math and physics titles took the shortest time, 1.8 years.
But when it comes to plagiarism of work by others, chemistry journals were the quickest to retract papers when compared to publications from other disciplines studied. The study pointed to a median retraction time of around 1.1 years.
Study coauthor Yulia Sevryugina, a chemistry librarian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, thinks journals take longer to retract papers that contain self-plagiarism because it’s more difficult to detect than conventional plagiarism.
The study examined over 5,900 papers that were retracted for self-plagiarism between 2001 and 2022 and are included in the Retraction Watch Database. The self-plagiarism involved instances of researchers’ duplication of text, images, and data from their previously published peer-reviewed studies.
Out of the 5,924 retractions, 1,334 (23%) were issued by chemistry journals. Of those, 627 were retracted because of duplication of images and 613 because of duplication of articles.
Serge Horbach, who studies research integrity at Radboud University but was not involved with the new study, notes that retractions of all types take a while. For journals to retract papers, editors must first notice or be alerted to potential problems with them, conduct inquiries into the allegations, and go through multiple steps—especially at big commercial publishers—to ensure that they are covered legally.
“I’m not so sure what makes chemistry journals more prone to speedy retraction processes,” Horbach says. “In general, the more black and white things are, the easier it is for journals to retract papers.”
But Sevryugina argues that self-plagiarism should fall under the ORI’s definition of research misconduct and shouldn’t be left for institutions to handle, as they may not have the resources necessary to carry out such investigations. “Self-plagiarism is something that we should consider seriously because the outcome is that as readers, as reviewers, as editors, we spend our valuable time in reading these redundant materials, which shouldn’t be so,” she says.