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On zombies, struldbrugs, and other horrors of the scientific literature

M. Berenbaum

Published 2021 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

When I signed on as Editor-in-Chief of PNAS, I had no idea that killing zombies would be part of the job. These zombies aren’t the spirits of Haitian mythology doomed to roam the earth in thrall to sorcerers and shamans or the brain-eating undead of contemporary movie and television fame. Rather, in scientific publishing, the phrase “zombie literature” refers to papers, deemed invalid for any number of scientific reasons, that are retracted by the journals that published them yet continue to be cited without any apparent acknowledgment of their lack of validity (e.g., ref. 1). Thepracticeof retractingpapers dates back to the early days of scientific publishing; the oldest English-language retraction, for example, is thought to be the note appearing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societyon June 24, 1756, titled, “A retraction, by Mr. Benjamin Wilson, F.R.S. of his former Opinion, concerning the explication of the Leyden Experiment” (2): Gentlemen, I think it necessary to retract an opinion concerning the explication of the Leyden experiment, which I troubled this Society with in the year 1746, and afterward published more at large in a Treatise upon Electricity, in the year 1750; as I have lately made some farther discoveries relative to that experiment, and the minus electricity of Mr. Franklin, which shew I was then mistaken in my notions about it. I shall be very glad to have this acknowledgment made public; and, to answer that end the most effectually, I wish it may have a place in the Transactions of the Royal Society (3). In the annotated version of this paper, appearing in volume XI of the collection of Philosophical Transactions from 1665 to 1800 assembled by Hutton et al. (3), a footnote explained that the troubling opinion of 1746 was not, in fact, published in Philosophical Transactions, although Wilson subsequently wrote A Treatise on Electricity, published in 1750, and some papers on the same subject in several volumes of Philosophical Transactions. As explained by Hutton et al. (3), he was “chiefly distinguished as the ostensible person whose perverse conduct in the affair of the conductors of lightning produced such shameful discord and dissensions in the Royal Society, as continued for many years after, to the detriment of science.” It seems likely, then, that, amid the discord sown by the first English-language retraction in 1756, the first Englishlanguage citation of a retracted paper might also have appeared in Philosophical Transactions soon thereafter. Wrestling with Retractions The longstanding practice of citing papers determined to be invalid reflects the fact that papers can be retracted as well as cited postpublication for many reasons. Historically, discoveries of major errors, ethical violations of various descriptions, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and/or problematical peer review have been among the main reasons for retraction (4), but, in recent years, papers have been retracted for other less malevolent reasons, including at the request of authors who detected an error in or could not replicate their own work (e.g., refs. 5 and 6). As for postretraction citations, reasons for citing a retracted paper are complex; some creep into the literature simply by virtue of unfortunate timing (as when a manuscript citing a paper is processed and May R. Berenbaum.

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