Retractions are primarily associated with wrongdoing, but are sometimes also issued for "honest mistakes". If so it's typically with a very clear explanation, like in the link below.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/an...
- The overall retraction rate is 4 in 10,000.
- Most researchers go their entire career without a retraction
- She now has 4.
We need more reproduction. Or have some rule: Check all assumptions. Yes, it's a lot of work, but man will it save a lot of fake stuff from getting out there and causing a lot of useless work.
It seems like you're implying she's written exceptionally shoddy papers.
But on the other hand she could also just be exceptionally honest -- one of the very few researchers to retract papers later on when they realize they weren't accurate, as opposed to the 99+% of researchers that wouldn't bother.
Also I would imagine that retraction rates might vary tremendously among fields and subfields. Imagine if a whole subfield had all its results based on a scientific technique believed to be accurate, and then the technique was discovered to be flawed? But the retractions wouldn't have anything to do with honesty or quality of the researchers.
So I'm gonna need more context here.
Why don't you explicitly state which you think it is?
My advisor was very chill about it. He said that retractions aren't a big deal and was glad I spotted the issue sooner rather than later.
I corrected the experimental methodology and while the results weren't quite as good, they were still quite good and I got published with the correct results.
I disagree. Your new results were much better, because they were sound.
Very well done.
NOTE: I DON'T FOLLOW THIS WORK CLOSELY: I am not sure that there are any successful programs using pluripotent somatic (adult) stem cells, if they even really exist, though there's lot of successful work with differentiated stem cells. So I think there's an unstated subtext as you surmise.
This paper was very important and eagerly received because the GW Bush administration had banned federal funding for research using foetal stem cells as a sop to the religious right (all that work moved to sg and cn, and continued in Europe).
Fraudulent/doctored images don't fall in to the incompetence/mistake category though.
Some types of mistakes/incompetence: improperly applied statistics, poor experiment design, faulty logic, mistakes in data collection.
[1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/272028/hilberts-alleged-p...
In that case, the retraction isn't didn't really get any publicity, and I'm actually proud of them for doing it, as many people wouldn't bother.
However, in practice I would say the majority of retractions are for wrongdoing on the part of the authors.
I wish, particularly in the case of the modern internet, that it was easier for authors to attach extras to old papers -- I have old papers where I would like to say "there is a typo in Table 2.3", and most journals have basically no way of doing this. I'm not retracting the paper over that of course! This is one advantage of arXiv, you can upload small fixes.
There could be a mistake the authors made which led to a wrong interpretation. Like, someone might write another article commenting on that mistake and wrong conclusions. But that wouldn’t be a reason for retraction. Something should be incredibly wrong for authors or journal to do that. Retractions due to fraud are much more common.