The study was published by Accountability in Research earlier this month. It found that biological science journals took the longest time to retract papers with self-plagiarism, 3.8 years, while math and physics titles took the shortest time, 1.8 years. But when it comes to plagiarism of work by others, chemistry journals were the quickest to retract papers when compared to publications from other disciplines studied. The study pointed to a median retraction time of around 1.1 years.
The study examined over 5,900 papers that were retracted for self-plagiarism between 2001 and 2022 and are included in the Retraction Watch Database. The self-plagiarism involved instances of researchers’ duplication of text, images, and data from their previously published peer-reviewed studies. Out of the 5,924 retractions, 1,334 (23%) were issued by chemistry journals. Of those, 627 were retracted because of duplication of images and 613 because of duplication of articles.
