On the closure of “Are there any scientific papers that were retracted by the publisher due to the reader comments?”

Question

Yesterday, I asked a question in Academia.SE: Are there any scientific papers that were retracted by the publisher due to the reader comments?

Disclaimer: I am not racist, and I am fully aware that this paper was written with crooked intentions. I do not approve the motivation of the authors who published this study.

With this said, I genuinely wondered whether there are any other publications that were retracted with the same official reason:

because of the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.

Wrzlprmft stated in the comments:

I am closing this question because:

1. Taken literally, it asks for a list with no best answer.
2. The next best question is whether this is commonly accepted practice, however, until the retraction notice is published, it is not clear what this is.
3. Even then, the question must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with people sharing their opinion on the retraction.

So, I looked up some questions. Those are the ones I immediately found when I typed "are there" in the search box:

• Are there any trustworthy Mathematics fee-based open access journals?
• Are there any examples of legal issues with academic fraud?
• Are there any guidelines for labeling axes in plots/graphs?
• Are there any researcher digital identification services or directories, similar to ORCID and ResearcherID?

Which tells me that (1) is not really a reason to close a question.

Also, (2) is plain wrong, because in the very same link I have posted, there is official retraction announcement, and I have written that verbatim in the question.

As for (3), I am willing to give examples from the top questions in Academia.SE:

• How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student?
• How to avoid procrastination during the research phase of my PhD?
• How to avoid being falsely accused of harassment by a student?
• How to read papers without falling into a rabbit hole?

None of those questions meet the criterion: “[T]he question must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with people sharing their opinion.”

Bryan Krauses comments encouraged me to check some questions that are answered by the users who voted to close my question for opinion-based:

• What are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?
• Reasons for not releasing bottom-line answers to old exam questions?
• How to avoid and address a lack of gender diversity in grant proposals?
• What am I being paid for? (postdoc)
• How to write the data section when data is reused from a previous work?
• I believe my PhD dissertation was unfairly graded too low (cum laude): what should I do?
• I got the following comment from a reputed math journal. What does it mean?

If the above questions are not opinion-based, I firmly believe that my question is very much not opinion based.

---

I asked the question over a simple debate with my colleagues. They claimed that there are many papers retracted without any solid reason, I claimed that there should be at least one clear reason or the follow-up actions should be taken.

By follow-up actions I mean:

1. Re-evaluation of all the publications that took the approval of the same reviewers and editors.
2. If the sources used are not credible (as in the official notice), then the papers those are based on those resources, in which 15 of them are published by Elsevier, should also be retracted.
3. It should be clearly stated that why are the resources not credible, and how was it determined after eight whole years. Because the paper in question is a survey paper, and one cannot claim it was falsified data because the data they provide were already published many years ago.

Facts:

1. I have formed my question very well, and clear.
2. This is a genuine question, stated out of curiosity, without any provocation or comments on the matter.
3. The answer to my question can be one example, or many examples. There is absolutely no restriction in the rules of the site which states that I cannot ask a question of which answers can be many.
4. None of the reasons that were stated as the reasons for closing are accurate (see above).

My question:
Why was my question voted to close, and was closed by one of the moderators? Has Academia SE become a place where we cannot even ask questions due to current political situations?

Answer 1

I voted to close the question because it did not have internal logical consistency.

First you quoted:

This retraction comes after a thorough review of the published article, the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.

Then you said:

I wonder whether there are other examples which the publisher retracts an article because of the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.

The quote you gave did not include a retraction reason. The quote is only a statement of what occurred. The logical inconsistency is because you changed "comes after" to "because."

Therefore, I voted to close as unclear. In fact, the question was sufficiently unclear that I am unsure if it is opinion-based. It is also possible that it is a shopping question.

People often select the wrong close reason.

Answer 2

1. My first point is about taking your question (“[Are there] other examples which the publisher retracts an article because of […]”) literally. This is admittedly not the best approach, but it’s one which you have to expect others to take when answering and which is easy: If the literal question is already clear and without any problems, that prevents a lot of problems right from the start and we do not have to go much further (except for bewaring of the XY problem). Unfortunately, your literal question has the problems I described: It asks for a list and presumably a lot of answers will be equal and going by your introduction, some answers won’t satisfy you, e.g., if we provided you with an article that has been retracted because half of the citations point to nowhere.

   Now, while the literal approach highlights some issues with your question, I do not think this is how you wanted your question to be understood, which brings us to the next point.

   So, I looked up some questions. Those are the ones I immediately found when I typed "are there" in the search box:
   […]

   Some of these questions are indeed problematic given our current rules and what we know to work well and I closed the first one for that reason. If my vote didn’t unilaterally close, I would also close the last one; feel free to cast a close vote if you agree. Others have not been answered with a list of items because they were not taken literally, which brings us again to the next point. In general, there are some old questions which should be closed but aren’t. If you stumble upon them, please flag or vote to close.

2. Also, (2) is plain wrong, because in the very same link I have posted, there is official retraction announcement […]

   Said retraction announcement ends with:

   The retraction notice is currently being finalized and will appear in the journal imminently.

   My understanding of this is that we can expect a detailed elaboration of the retraction in the next weeks. At the time I posted this answer, the article in question showed no sign of the retraction. Now, two weeks later, it does and this notice is clearly different from what you linked.

   While questions about the rationale of the journal may be appropriate on this site, we can only speculate about this rationale from the brief outline given in the announcement. I do not think any good can come from this kind of speculation.

3. None of those questions meet the criterion "the question must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with people sharing their opinion."

   Here, the topic of your question indeed is relevant as it makes it considerably more likely that it will escalate into a debate about the retraction itself, attract trolls and racists, and cause other problems. The comments your question attracted so far already give a taste of this. This is not primarily your fault, but good intentions do not suffice to prevent this. A good (but not perfect) way to avoid such problems is to be as specific as possible about the answers you want (again bewaring of the XY problem) and thus excluding pure opinions, etc.

   So: Yes, I am putting your question under higher scrutiny, but not to censor the topic but to ensure that it stays within our guidelines and to be able to have questions and answers about it without attracting trouble.

In general, closing a question is about avoiding answers and thus – strictly speaking – it is not about the way the question is phrased or intended but about the answers we expect it to receive. Often this does not make a difference, but here it does: I closed your question because it bears a high risk to attract a problematic collection of answers in its current state for several reasons.

---

You also revealed your motivation (the Y to the X, if you so wish):

I asked the question over a simple debate with my colleagues. They claimed that there are many papers retracted without any solid reason, I claimed that there should be at least one clear reason or the follow-up actions should be taken. By follow-up actions I mean […]

There are many opinion-based aspects about this: What exactly constitutes the solid reason your colleagues talk about? You on the other hand talk about what should be done. We do not answer how the world should be here, we can only discuss how it is. Yes, we have ethics, but that should always be with respect to either generally accepted standards (e.g., on plagiarism), a specified authority (e.g., COPE), or at least solicit a neutral assessment of the ethical dilemmas.