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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. That's nasty. They throw in a detracting bit of racist accusations as well.

> all related citations are lost

What an extreme BS argument. It's really grasping at straws.

The citations aren’t lost though, are they. They still exist in the paper, they just point to a retraction. You can still find the papers that cited the retracted paper.

And I suspect you’ll still get new citations since it’s not unheard of that people cite a paper based on seeing it in some other paper, rather than reading the paper directly. I don’t think people should do that, but they do.

The citations won't be counted by the big databases like scopus and web of science, which are often a prerequisite when being measured for grants etc.

Of course they shouldn’t be measured. They are recalled.

Of course, I don’t think people with recalled papers due to their fraud need to ever concern themselves with grants. (Kind of like felons can never be an officer of a publicly traded company)

Next to nothing related to scientific research is tracked in scopus and web of science anyway, so your point is moot.

I don't follow you. They track scientific publications and their citation networks. I feel like you are reading something in my post I didn't claim. My point was that the citations can be lost in the sense than they wont be counted by the bibliographic databases that are usually used by administrators to get citation numbers for evaluating researchers and institutions. Of course the citations still exist between the papers. But for a researcher their bibliometric indicators will come out lower after a redaction, in most cases when they are evaluated for grants or career progression.

But that measurement isn’t done through Scopus or Web of Science.

It’s done by evaluating biosketches of grant applicants in their application. It’s not like the grant reviewer checks Scopus for the applicants citation count or something.

I recently reviewed some grant applications and I reviewed the applicants bio sketch including their experience and publications. I didnt count the citations for each paper. But if I did, I certainly wouldn’t count citations for any papers that were retracted.

Of course the citations should be lost (not counted).

But the paragraph is about collaboraters being angry and frustrated. And they seem to be angry at those who faked the data. Which is understandable.

You would hope that this would also mean that collaborators getting their name on a paper would put a little more effort into scutinizing the data provided by co-authors.

Maybe it is just a little to easy to work on paper and just accept the underlying data without asking any questions.

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