Questioning Authority: The Diffusion of Misinformation Among the Scientific Community

Jillian Peyton* and Jennifer Harker, Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Field (Broad Category): Communications/Journalism (Behavioral & Social Sciences) 

Student’s Major: ADPR 

The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation define “scientific misconduct” as consisting of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (“Part 689—research misconduct,” 2002). Scientific misconduct occurs in scientific literature, and commonly, after an article faces retraction, it is still cited as factual information, plaguing readers with false ideas (Lewandowsky et al., 2012). Resulting from both misconduct and unintentional errors in scientific literature, misinformation diffuses among social networks despite counterefforts (Budd et at., 1999). This spread of misinformation has the potential to negatively impact the scientific community and the public’s knowledge and health (Chen and Milbank, 2013). To learn more about the diffusion of false and fabricated data within the scientific community and beyond, we analyzed 840 retracted articles collected from the website RetractionWatch.org database that were published from 2000 to 2018 by authors with four or more retractions. This time period was selected to ensure audiences have means of being notified of retractions via internet publishing. Citations of the retracted works were then collected by using the webofknowledge database. The final number of citing articles (n = 49,630) are being tracked to examine the types of post-retraction citations that occur. Further, we apply social network analysis to explore the diffusion of misinformation across academic journals. Using this data, we hope to devise methods to help slow the spread of misinformation among scientific literature. 

Funding: 

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: Other