Trends in Retraction of Orthopaedic Research Articles

Despite the use of in-depth peer-review processes, there occasionally are issues with published manuscripts that require retraction. The purpose of the present study was to explore the reasons for the retraction of orthopaedic research articles, with consideration of the journal impact factor and the orthopaedic subspecialty.

In 2023, a database search was conducted for retracted papers written in the English language in the orthopaedic literature. The initial search yielded 3,147 results. These papers were screened by 3 independent reviewers, and 207 studies were jointly identified as retracted orthopaedic research articles. We collected data regarding the reasons for retraction, the date of publication, the date of retraction, the orthopaedic subspecialty, the impact factor of the journal, the countries of research origin, and the study design.

Of the 207 retracted articles, 104 (50.2%) were clinical science studies and 103 (49.8%) were basic science studies. The reasons for retraction were plagiarism (n = 39), intrinsic errors (n = 33), duplication (n = 30), fraud (n = 25), manipulation of the peer-review process (n = 20), no reason given (n = 18), no approval from an ethics board (n = 17), author's choice (n = 9), data ownership and/or copyright issue (n = 9), and other (n = 7). The journal impact factors ranged from 0.17 to 9.80, with a median of 2.90. The mean time from publication to retraction across all of the studies was 32.1 months (standard deviation = 37.3 months; n = 201).

An analysis of orthopaedic research revealed that the majority of retractions of articles were due to plagiarism, study errors, or duplicated material; retractions occurred internationally and across a wide range of journals.