Romero: Retractions often too late to stop spread of bad information

Quoted by the Washington Post: Associate Professor Daniel Romero "Retractions aren't a panacea for bad research"

Wednesday, 07/13/2022

Research jointly led by researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information and Northwestern University shows that retractions do not adequately dampen the spread of problematic research.

The Washington Post reports that UMSI associate professor Daniel Romero and Hao Peng, a UMSI doctoral graduate and current postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern, studied nearly 3,000 retracted papers and compared their reach to 13,500 studies that were not retracted. The researchers found that the papers with problematic information received more attention on news sites and on social media than those that weren’t retracted, probably because “of their compelling results,” the Post reports.