Yes that blue line is retractions in scientific journals. Dr Roger Pielke Jr. notes on his blog that:
The Wall Street Journal reports that retractions of scientific papers have surged in recent years, with the top 3 journals issuing retractions being PNAS, Science and Nature. The graph above shows the increase in the rate of retracted papers.
Pharmalot provides a summary:
[T]here were just 22 retraction notices that appeared in journals 10 years ago, but 139 were published in 2006 and by last year, the number reached 339. Through July of this year, there were a total 210 retractions, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which maintains an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals.
Meanwhile, retractions related to fraud rose more than sevenfold between 2004 and 2009, exceeding a twofold rise traced to mistakes, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. After studying 742 papers that were withdrawn from 2000 to 2010, the analysis found that 73.5 percent were retracted simply for error, but 26.6 percent were retracted for fraud. Ominously, 31.8 percent of retracted papers were not noted as retracted (read the abstract).
It should also be noted that there are more journals now than in 1977 and we have rapid publishing tools instead of a drafting table and a typewriter.
Read the rest here http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/08/surging-retractions-in-scientific.html
I wonder if the Monnett polar bear paper will become a new data point on the graph above? It certainly started out as one.
Few, if any, alarmist anthropogenic climate change papers will be retracted, because they have no shame.
Actually a good sign. Shows that the power of external auditing via the Web is starting to wear down the old aristocrats. They can’t get away with nearly as much nonsense now.
This is a disturbing trend.
What would be interesting is someone with access to citations databases to list the percentage of climate papers referencing tainted or withdrawn papers.
After all, if you rely on something that is wrong, its likely that your conclusions are also wrong
Mann that’s a lot of retractions.
So, essentially, statistically model speaking, a third of your study will be retracted. I put forth the IPCC AR4 as observed proof.
Why did they even bother getting a higher education, I wonder? What do they tell their folks? Sorry dad, mom, you ruined yourself getting your offspring an education in academia, and all your offspring could do was to not pay attention so as not to screw up, even with the help of others likeminded screw ups who took the time to review and point out the obvious flaws. How big a failure can these people be with all the money and help they get to try and get it right?
Isn’t that just precious.
Note the upward blip during the 1998 El Nino stands out like a sore thumb. Coincidence?
0.035% of publications are retracted. Always watch the actual numbers. It is certainly interesting that the rate is up from pretty much zero thirty years ago. But the actual numbers suggest very few papers actually are retracted. The question is, is this surge due to greater tendency for wrong or fraudulent science, or a greater tendency for there to be actual honesty in admitting that your paper was wrong or fraudulent, or just more people getting caught? I suspect this is simply an improved a posteriori vetting process: the internet probably plays a big role, as there is great public scrutiny of scientific findings and papers. So problems with various papers are probably being spotted more often after the fact than used to be the case. The problem is that we now are getting some idea of how many errors/frauds are NOT caught a priori by the peer review process, only a posteriori by public scrutiny.
It used to be publish-or-perish. Now it is publish-or-starve, publish-or-your-university-starves.
Of course researchers crank them out.
What!? You mean the scientific process works? For some discipline’s at least. You know, those disciplines where replication and data sharing are the norm instead of the exception.
I wouldn’t expect a lot of AGW alarmist retractions; as UnFrozenCavemen commented, “They have no shame”, along with no honesty, no adherence to proper science process, they do have plenty of gall and some amazing imperial popinjay attitudes.
Now THERE’S a hockey stick …
Nick Stokes said that?
Tenney Naubamer maybe?
Hank Whats-his-face perhaps?
Is it becasue people have got better at spotting rubbish or becasue more rubbish is written?
Either way remember most of these paper have gone through ‘peer review’ to get published in the first place . The process that is supposed to produce perfect and unchallengeable knowledge or so the climate scientists would claim .
If this trend continues (and we have come to learn that ALL trends in climate science are destined to continue in perpetuity) then, some time around the year 2040, every paper submitted for publication will be retracted.
If the vertical axes are to be believed, retractions, even though increasing, are almost zero (less than 0.005% of the total). Of the 35 retractions, it would be interesting to know what branch of science was the leader and which had the most fraudulent papers. I doubt climate science recorded any of either. A better indicator would be how many fraudulent Nobel prizes were given away in the past 40 years.
Nick says:
August 12, 2011 at 11:15 am
What would be interesting is someone with access to citations databases to list the percentage of climate papers referencing tainted or withdrawn papers.
After all, if you rely on something that is wrong, its likely that your conclusions are also wrong
——————————————————————————————————-
I.e. MBH98, and all the “adjusted” temperature data sets.
The competition for the government dollar is getting fierce.
Oh come on guys – simply the rise in publications accounts for a fair amount of this.
Besides – when was the last correction one of y’all made on what are frequently bogus claims? When?
Just saying…
The graph is potentially deceiving. A raw number of publications is compared to a ratio. This might have the tendency to make one think that perhaps the rise of retractions is simply following the rise of published papers. In reality, QA has really gone down, the ratio of good to bad is what is peaking fast, not the number of bad.
I do agree with Nick though, I’d like to see a cross-comparison of citations of withdrawn papers.
I would have thought that better technology would lead to more accurate results.
Not at all. There are always false reports, errors, omissions, and some fraud. As I wrote earlier this week on Wm. Brigg’s site, you can go back to Newton, no scientific slouch, he, to find circular logic and some downright fudging of results. It is probably that we are more able to spot this now, and more willing to call it out. T’is a good thing.
So, clearly this should be added to the Warmlist, the list of those things caused by global warming. As termperatures increase, so do scientific journal retractions.
Hmmm – These curves seem to correlate with the US of A’s accelerating national debt. Could it be that wasteful government spending fosters more sloppy, low quality research, willful ‘scientific’ malfeasance, and out right fraud, requiring increased retractions upon discovery?
A summary of retractions and some percentages would be interesting.
As I read the chart, it’s 35/100,000 not 1/3rd.
I suspect a previous poster is right that this trend has more to do with the growth of the internet and there being more people willing and able to review papers after they are published.
KnR said:
I think you are right on both points. However, several years ago, before the World Wide Web, I was involved in a research project for a small start-up company. Early on, we hired a researcher to dig up as many papers on the subject of our project as she could find, both from the local university library and from several online data bases. In going through the papers, I would say that fully 90% of them contained major errors, were rushed/incomplete, or attempted to state unjustified conclusions. We wrote these off to ‘publish of perish’ where they had to publish something/anything in order to keep their job. We also assumed that the reviewers didn’t want to break the author’s rice bowl, much less be responsible for them losing their position.