A blog, named Retraction Watch (retractionwatch.com), has been created in 2010 to collect retractions of scientific papers. The blog is produced by Ivan Oransky—now vice president and global editorial director of MedPage Today, vice president of the Association of Health Care Journalists, and a journalist teacher—and Adam Marcus—managing editor of Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News and Anesthesiology News. They created the blog for a couple of reasons that you can read on their first post (http://retractionwatch.com/2010/08/03/why-write-a-blog-about-retractions/). The one that attracted my attention is the intention to publicize retractions because they are not well publicized. This was true when the blog was started, but the trend is changing, maybe slowly. You may find here and there articles on scientists’ misconduct, but it is true that it is not easy to find all retractions listed in one place. The blog is not only a list of retractions, but a description of each case, sometimes also citing people’s comments. My post doesn’t want to advertise Retraction Watch, but I was impressed from the number of posts they have every month—a couple every day. If you want to have a comprehensive and updated view of the retraction landscape, this is the website to visit. You may find interesting posts.

When I started writing this blog, my intention was to report highlights on the most recent scientific findings in biomedical research. Now I am here writing my third post on reporting bad science. Unfortunately, these days science is not only about innovation and research advance. In each number of each journal there is at least a retraction or an article discussing retractions or reproducibility of the results. Instead of reporting science, we write on how science is performed and how it should be performed. We should instead use the pages of a journal or of a website to report innovation.

I hope that the future will be more about highlighting good scientific results than publicizing bad science.

Happy Holidays!