Increasingly, scholarly journals have begun retracting published articles for reasons other than those described by advisory organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Numerous research articles have been retracted of late due to political concerns. Additionally, some articles have been retracted for behavioral misconduct, which was also the subject of a recent COPE discussion forum. ‘Behavioral misconduct’ denotes harmful or immoral behavior of one or more authors that is unrelated to the article’s findings or content. We investigated whether federally funded research scientists considered behavioral misconduct a valid reason for retracting published findings and whether the type of behavioral misconduct involved, the level of the expected scientific impact of the article in question, or the kind of editorial action taken affected their support of retraction. Of the 464 participants who took our survey, we found that researchers largely oppose retraction of a published article or removing an author when scientists commit behavioral misconduct, regardless of the type of misconduct involved. However, there was greater support for retraction when the misconduct was financial as compared to racial or sexual misconduct. Not surprisingly, researchers were more likely to use the published information in question in their own work when its impact was high. Future studies should investigate the extent to which these findings are moderated by researchers’ editorial experience and other demographic factors.

越来越多的学术期刊开始出于出版道德委员会 (COPE) 等咨询组织所述之外的原因撤回已发表的文章。由于政治考虑，许多研究文章最近被撤回。此外，一些文章因行为不当而被撤回，这也是最近 COPE 论坛的主题。“不当行为”是指一位或多位作者与文章的发现或内容无关的有害或不道德的行为。我们调查了联邦资助的研究科学家是否认为行为不当行为是撤回已发表研究结果的正当理由，以及所涉及的行为不当行为的类型、相关文章的预期科学影响水平或所采取的编辑行动的类型是否影响了他们对以下观点的支持：撤回。在参与我们调查的 464 名参与者中，我们发现，当科学家犯下不当行为时，研究人员大多反对撤回已发表的文章或删除作者，无论涉及何种类型的不当行为。然而，与种族或性方面的不当行为相比，当不当行为是经济方面的时，人们更支持撤回。毫不奇怪，当相关信息影响力较大时，研究人员更有可能在自己的工作中使用相关已发表的信息。未来的研究应该调查这些发现在多大程度上受到研究人员的编辑经验和其他人口因素的影响。