Post-publication peer review (PPPR) has emerged as an important supplement to traditional peer review, with social media playing a growing role in publicising potential problems in published research. However, it remains unclear whether social media discussions of retracted articles primarily reflect good practices, such as exposing flaws and acknowledging retraction status, or bad practices, such as overlooking retractions and continuing to disseminate scientific misinformation. In this study, we collected Bluesky posts referencing scholarly articles from Altmetric and retrieved metadata for the referenced articles using OpenAlex. The final dataset included 284 retracted articles with 79 pre-retraction posts and 857 post-retraction posts, 59 retraction notices with 186 posts, and 609,461 non-retracted articles with 1,344,756 posts. We manually coded Bluesky posts discussing retracted articles to identify instances of good and bad practice. The results show that posts demonstrating good practice (89.9%) substantially outnumbered those demonstrating bad practice (10.1%). Posts reflecting good practice also had more user engagement. In the pre-retraction phase, good practice posts constituted a slight minority (43.0%), whereas in the post-retraction phase they were dominant (94.2%). Most negative posts in the pre-retraction phase (90.0%) had good practice while only 17.3% positive posts in the post-retraction phase showed bad practice. Thus, sentiment analysis can be helpful to filter posts that could flag potential flaws before retraction, but it may struggle to accurately identify the spread of misinformation after retraction. More broadly, this study highlights the potential of Bluesky to support responsible scientific communication, public scrutiny, and research integrity.
翻译:发表后同行评议(PPPR)已成为传统同行评议的重要补充,社交媒体在曝光已发表研究中潜在问题的作用日益增强。然而,关于撤稿论文的社交媒体讨论主要反映的是良好实践(如揭露缺陷和承认撤稿状态)还是不良实践(如忽视撤稿并持续传播科学错误信息),目前尚不明确。本研究从Altmetric收集了引用学术论文的Bluesky帖子,并使用OpenAlex检索被引用论文的元数据。最终数据集包含284篇撤稿论文(79条撤稿前帖子与857条撤稿后帖子)、59篇撤稿通知(186条帖子)以及609,461篇未撤稿论文(1,344,756条帖子)。我们手动标注了讨论撤稿论文的Bluesky帖子,以识别良好与不良实践案例。结果显示,体现良好实践的帖子(89.9%)数量显著超过不良实践帖子(10.1%),且良好实践帖子获得了更高的用户参与度。在撤稿前阶段,良好实践帖子略占少数(43.0%),而撤稿后阶段则占主导地位(94.2%)。撤稿前阶段90.0%的负面帖子属于良好实践,而撤稿后阶段仅17.3%的正面帖子存在不良实践。因此,情感分析有助于筛选撤稿前可能标记潜在缺陷的帖子,但在撤稿后准确识别错误信息传播方面效果有限。更广泛而言,本研究凸显了Bluesky在支持负责任的科学传播、公众监督与研究诚信方面的潜力。