Evaluation of retracted publications related to oral health: a scoping review.

Abstract

Introduction Recent studies revealed high rates of questionable research practices and scientific misconduct among academic researchers. These practices may result in retraction of scientific publications. This scoping review aimed to analyse the characteristics of retracted publications with a focus on dental research.Methods To identify retracted articles in the field of dentistry, electronic searches were performed on PubMed Central, Web of Science, and the Retraction Watch website. Subsequently, data extraction was performed on identified relevant publications. Descriptive statistics were used to provide an overview of the characteristics of retracted scientific publications in dental research.Results The final dataset consisted of 333 retracted articles. The majority of these publications were written by authors from Asia (60.6%), particularly India (22.2%) and China (20.1%). More than half of the publications were retracted because of various forms of misconduct (57.4%), such as plagiarism, data duplication and data fabrication. Oral pathology was the subdiscipline in dentistry with the highest number of retracted publications (26.4%) and animal studies were the most prevalent study design among retracted publications (14.1%).Conclusions A large number of publications in dental research have been retracted during the past two decades, primarily to instances of scientific misconduct. Researchers, journal editors and academic institutions should prioritise the prevention and detection of misconduct to uphold the credibility and reliability of published dental literature.