Data for: "Self-correction of science: a comparative study of negative citations and post-publication peer review"
Description
In order to evaluate negative citations in articles and comments on PubPeer as mechanisms for correcting science, we have built up a corpus of articles associated with retraction or correction notices. As we are interested in citations, we focus here on articles with at least 1 citation according to Scite database, that is 45,811 articles.
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We used Scopus and the Web of Science to constitute a corpus of 72,069 articles (metadata), focusing on a particular discipline, on some particular journals and even individuals. We used 3 different criteria (discipline, journal, author) and constituted 7 datasets for comparison (Table 2): - Discipline: we chose the Engineering field which seems to have not been the focus of as much attention as biomedical sciences. We retrieved the ISSN of all journals classified in the Engineering subject area according to the ASJC classification scheme and made two queries to retrieve the corresponding articles from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, limiting the results to 2012-2015 publication years. - Journal: * we chose 2 journals in biomedical field, Cancer Research and Tumor Biology, which are journals with high rates of retractions according to the RetractionWatch database, * we chose a multidisciplinary high-impact journal, Science, because some studies hypothesized that articles in high-profile journals are more prone to retractions (Fang and Casadevall 2011; Furman et al. 2012) and also because the most prestigious journals publish the least reliable science according to (Brembs 2018). We used their ISSN to retrieve articles from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, limiting the results to 2012-2015 publication years. - Author: with 3 high-profile researchers whose substantial part of their work has been officially retracted or corrected: Sarkar, Schön and Voinnet. We made 3 queries and retrieved all published articles of these authors with no publication date limit.