Working Paper: NBER ID: w21146
Authors: Pierre Azoulay; Alessandro Bonatti; Joshua L. Krieger
Abstract: We investigate how the scientific community's perception of a scientist's prior work changes when one of his articles is retracted. Relative to non-retracted control authors, faculty members who experience a retraction see the citation rate to their earlier, non-retracted articles drop by 10% on average, consistent with the Bayesian intuition that the market inferred their work was mediocre all along. We then investigate whether the eminence of the retracted author and the cause of the retraction (fraud vs. mistake) shape the magnitude of the penalty. We find that eminent scientists are more harshly penalized than their less distinguished peers in the wake of a retraction, but only in cases involving fraud or misconduct. When the retraction event had its source in “honest mistakes,” we find no evidence of differential stigma between high- and low-status faculty members.
Keywords: scandal; scientific retractions; reputation; Bayesian updating
JEL Codes: O31; O33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Retraction event (Y60) | citation rates of non-retracted articles (A14) |
| Retraction event (Y60) | citation rates of non-retracted articles (eminent scientists) (A14) |
| Type of retraction (Y60) | citation rates of non-retracted articles (A14) |
| Perceived severity of misconduct (K42) | citation rates of non-retracted articles (A14) |
| Type of retraction (Y60) | community's beliefs about a scientist's reliability (D83) |