Taormina

This talk will present Tala’s analysis of retracted “zombie trials.” This is the second presentation of this work, now shared with an international audience. These trials were defined as reporting fabricated, fictitious, or imaginary data. Retraction reasons were extracted from PubMed, the Retraction Watch Database, and PubPeer using an R-based text-mining approach designed to match retraction reasons to this definition. Both automated and manual extraction procedures were used to characterize study and author-level variables. A total of 236 retracted “zombie trials” were identified, involving 66 first authors: “recidivists” (n = 12, 18.2%, 179 trials) and “non-recidivists” (n = 54, 81.8%, 57 trials). Retracted “zombie trials” were disproportionately associated with authors with a history of similar publications. This pattern may reflect increased scrutiny of certain authors, but it also suggests that examining publication histories may be important for detecting potential research fraud and preventing further contamination of the evidence base.

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