This study assesses the retractions of scientific articles in engineering journals indexed on the Web of Science from 1945 to 2015. The data set was built based on documents containing the keywords retracted, retraction, withdrawal, or redress. We used database exploration techniques, including Structured Query Language and analysis of variance, for data analysis. We analyzed 238 retractions published by 117 journals. The most common reason for retraction was unethical research, and higher impact factors journals tended to publish more retractions. In (...) conclusion, most of the analyzed retractions were the result of unethical research and were retracted by editors. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to compare the quantity of citations that retracted and nonretracted articles received in engineering based on articles indexed in the Web of Science database and published between 1945 and 2015. For data analysis, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was used along with the Kolmogorov–Smirnov, Mann–Whitney, Tukey–Kramer tests and descriptive statistics. The data set included 238 retracted and 236 nonretracted articles, with the retracted articles cited 2,348 times and nonretracted articles cited 2,957 times. (...) The results highlight that retraction does not end citation, thus threatening scientific credibility. (shrink)

This study aimed to outline the profile of retractions of scientific articles on COVID-19 published in journals indexed in the Scopus database between 2020 and 2021. To analyze the data, we used a bibliometric technique, with the Bibliometrix package in the R-Studio software, and descriptive statistics. Twenty-nine retractions were analyzed, and we found that the most common reasons for retraction were related to ethical issues and that 68.97% of authors have previously retracted articles. We concluded that there appears to have (...) been a change in the publication policies of journals, which resulted in an increase in scientific retractions related to COVID-19 during the study period. (shrink)