The mission of the Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent organization of Retraction Watch, is to promote transparency and integrity in science and scientific publishing, and to disseminate best practices and increase efficiency in science.
To know more about the Retraction Watch staff see here
SUMMARY ✎
Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers. The blog was launched in August 2010 by science writers Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus.
Oransky and Marcus were motivated to launch the blog to increase the transparency of the retraction process. They observed that retractions of papers generally are not announced, and the reasons for retractions are not publicized. One result is that other researchers or the public who are unaware of the retraction may make decisions based on invalid results. Oransky describes an example of a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reported that a certain molecule could cause some types of breast cancers to respond to a drug that would otherwise be ineffective. Although the paper was retracted, its retraction was not reported in the media outlets that had reported on its conclusions, and before it was retracted a company had been established to make use of the reported discovery.
The blog argues that retractions provide a window into the self-correcting nature of science, and can provide insight into cases of scientific fraud. Its operators say that as science journalists, they have "found retractions to be the source of great stories that say a lot about how science is conducted."