The relationship and incidence of three editorial notices in PubPeer: Errata, expressions of concern, and retractions

This article studies the incidence and relationship of three important relevant editorial notices: errata, expressions of concern, and retractions. The journal club PubPeer was used to extract 39,449 research articles and the 2,308 errata, 189 expressions of concern, and 1,531 retractions associated with these publications. The relationship, time delay, and evolution of these publications were then compared, as was their incidence in journals and disciplines. The results show that the relationship between them is scant, the increase in these notices is in proportion to the scientific literature, and the time delay between publication and editorial notice is frequently over 3 years. According to incidence, editorial notices are more frequent in journals specializing in biochemistry, medicine, and multidisciplinarity, and cancer journals release more errata. Research areas with more editorial notices are the life and health sciences. The research fields with the highest percentages of errata and retractions are Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, and Immunology and Microbiology. It is recognized that the use of PubPeer as a data source may have influenced the results.