RedacTek, a software company that supports academic research, has launched a free online tool that informs researchers if an article they intend to cite as a reference has been flagged on the PubPeer website, a forum that identifies and discusses evidence of errors or fraud in scientific articles and has established itself as a hub for allegations of misconduct (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 332). RedacTek’s browser plugin extracts and cross-references information from various sources, including PubPeer’s own databases; the organization Crossref, which assigns digital object identifiers to articles; and OpenAlex, a bibliographic catalog of hundreds of millions of scientific documents.
Rick Meyler, founder of the company based in Emeryville, California, told Nature that the objective of the initiative is to alert unsuspecting researchers and reduce the circulation of low-quality science. The software also provides a metric called the retraction association value, indicating the extent to which a scientific article’s bibliography is associated with papers that have been retracted due to errors or fraud. The plugin even determines whether papers cited in article references have been retracted as far as the third degree, meaning it finds retractions in the references of articles cited as references. According to Meyler, the tool can be an important resource for journal editors seeking to measure the quality of manuscripts submitted for publication.
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