I do have two anecdotes on this - came across two papers in my exact area of combinatorics that had incorrect results; but they had been submitted to IEEE conferences. So presumably the referees just glanced at them and waved them through.<p>I wrote to the conference organizers explaining in very simple terms that it could be easily shown the results were wrong (i.e. "please send this to the original referees" - easy, you would think ...) One of them was sympathetic but said it can't be withdrawn from IEEE, and the other was like "get lost, I don't care". It was quite an eye opener. You really don't know what this is like until you've tried it.<p>I eventually wrote to the author and his work (Porton Down) saying the same thing and the author reacted quite well. Still, the IEEE site for the papers doesn't say anything. Just my comments on pubpeer. And that doesn't come up in a google search. So there are still people wasting their time reading a result known to be wrong.<p><a href="https://pubpeer.com/publications/9842D9E91821B0F7CADE333BE9DC7B" rel="nofollow">https://pubpeer.com/publications/9842D9E91821B0F7CADE333BE9D...</a>
<a href="https://pubpeer.com/publications/BF67542504DA9118ECBE8869EAF627" rel="nofollow">https://pubpeer.com/publications/BF67542504DA9118ECBE8869EAF...</a><p>The only (obvious) red flag for a potential reader is of course - it was supposedly a very big result, so why was it at an IEEE conference instead of a top combinatorics journal?
> It’s not Big Pharma that’s responsible for most retractions<p>This is not at all surprising to me. Big Pharma has teams of professional statisticians, writers, copy-editors, fact-checkers, etc. and have much more rigorously enforced standards than most academic research institutions. Their bias comes out more in how they frame the study and in the choice of things they study, but I think in general I would trust Big Pharma to be more accurate in reporting their study results than academic labs.
> doing the right thing pays, which is why we created a category to recognize such actions and even helped start a now-moribund award, called the DIRT, to honor good behavior.<p>If the incentives are wrong, do your bit to change the incentives!<p>Retraction Watch is a worthy contribution to the repositories of shared knowledge that are of so much benefit to all of us.
Is anyone aware of a "false positive" retraction?<p>Meaning a retraction that was later found to be in error, resulting in re-publication (or whatever)?<p>I imagine the bar for retraction is so high it would never happen, but it would be really interesting if it ever did.