Retraction : The Other Face of Research Collaboration

There is an increasing amount of research investigating retractions. Yet little attention has been paid to the relationship between retractions and collaboration. This study draws upon two notions from the social psychological literature on group interaction – diffusion of responsibility and internal auditing – to examine the effect of collaboration size on retraction. We test our hypotheses regarding the relationship between retractions and collaboration on a unique publication dataset of retractions and its control group constructed by the nearest-neighbor-matching approach. Our analysis does not support the diffusion of responsibility as no significant evidence indicates that collaboration suffers from producing flawed research, at least in the form of retraction. We also find that ceteris paribus publications with authors from elite universities are less likely but quickly to be retracted. There also is no significant impact of collaboration size on the speed of retraction of Chinese articles, although China stands out with the fastest retracting speed. Our findings have policy implications for the governance of global science, especially that involves collaboration.