Abstract
Retraction is the process of removing an article from the scientific records after it has been published. The objective of the study is to explore the influence of the number of retracted papers on the journal quality parameters in the subject of Psychology. The study has applied Pearson Coefficient Correlation to establish the relationship between the number of retracted papers and bibliometric parameters of journal evaluation. All the retracted journal articles indexed in the Scopus database up to the year 2022 in the subject of Psychology, were considered for the study. The Software tools, i.e. MS Excel, and statistical software R Studio® (version 3.6.1) along with the Biblioshiny bibliometrics package were used for data analysis. Bibliometrics indicators, i.e. SJR, total citations count, and h index of the journals, were retrieved from the website of Scimago Journal Ranking (www.scimagojr.com), and the Journal Impact Factor (IF) 2022 was used for the analysis. The results revealed a set of 180 journal articles scattered across 99 journals, that were retracted in the subject of Psychology. Among these 36% of the retracted papers were published as open access. From the analysis, it was concluded that there is a positive correlation between the number of retracted papers and bibliometric indicators i.e., impact factor, h-index, total citation counts, and JCR. On the other hand, there is the least influence of the number of retracted articles with SJR (0.024) and IF (0.072). However, a visible and normal co-relation was found among the total citation counts (0.170) and h-index (0.136), respectively. The findings of the study revealed that there is the least correlation between the number of retracted journal articles and the journal evaluation indicators; therefore, journal publishers must include a retraction policy to enhance the journal’s reputation.
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Data availability
The bibliographic data was collected from the Scopus (www.scopus.com) database on 13th August, 2023. For the analysis of bibliometric indicators, i.e. SJR, total citations count and h index of the journals, were retrieved from the website of Scimago Journal Ranking (www.scimagojr.com), and the Journal Impact Factor (IF) 2022 was used for the analysis was collected from JCR Report, on request and further verified from the respective journal website. The datasets generated are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We extend our gratitude to Dr. Satish Kumar, Deputy Librarian, IIT (ISM) Dhanbad for generously sharing the data of Journal Impact Factor 2022 from the Journal Citation Report. We are also deeply thankful to Prof. Jaideep Sharma, Professor, Faculty of Library and Information Science, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi, for his invaluable guidance throughout the course of this research.
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No human participants were interviewed for this study, which involves the analysis of archival publishing data. Thus, we have depended on the journals whose data have been studied to comply with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later addenda.
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Behera, P.K., Jain, S.J. & Kumar, A. Examining retraction counts to evaluate journal quality in psychology. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06044-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06044-y