• Evelyne Decullier, Laure Huot, and Hervé Maisonneuve.
• Hospices Civils de Lyon, Pôle Information Médicale Evaluation Recherche, Unité de Recherche Clinique, Lyon F-69003, France. evelyne.decullier@chu-lyon.fr.
• BMC Res Notes. 2014 Jun 25; 7: 395.

BackgroundTo investigate fraud and errors, scientists have studied cohorts of retraction notices. These researches have been performed using a PubMed search on publication type "retraction of publication" which retrieves the notices of the retractions. We assessed the stability of the indexation of retraction notices over a 15-month period and what was the time-lag to get stability.FindingsA search on notices of retraction issued in 2008 was repeated every 3 months during 15 months from February 2011. The first search resulted in 237 notices of retraction. Throughout the study period, 14 discrepancies with the initial search were observed (6%). We found that the number of retraction notices became stable 35 months after the retraction.ConclusionsThe time-lag observed in this study has to be taken into account when performing a PubMed search.

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