Retraction activities of EdTech journals
Due to my current side-project of getting a plagiarised, AI-generated book retracted, I was curious to see how selected top-ranked journals in Educational Technology have been actively retracting articles. I have been using the GoogleScholar ranking and have focused on journals I would include in this list. Here is a table of my findings.
| Journal | Number of retractions | Reasons |
|---|---|---|
| Computers and Education | 4 | Double publication, plagiarism |
| Education and Information Technologies | 13 | Plagiarism, Lack of ethics approval documents, authorship sale |
| British Journal of Educational Technology | 3 | Plagiarism |
| International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education | 0 | - |
| Educational Technology Research and Development | 0 | - |
| Interactive Learning Environments | 0 | - |
| Journal of Computer Assisted Learning | 1 | Plagiarism |
| Journal of Educational Computing Research | 0 | - |
| The Internet and Higher Education | 1 | (Self-)plagiarism/double publication |
| Australasian Journal of Educational Technology | 0 | - |
| International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning | 0 | - |
| Educational Technology & Society | 1 | Data manipulation |
| Learning, Media and Technology | 0 | - |
| TechTrends | 0 | - |
| Distance Education | 0 | - |
| Language Learning and Technology | 0 | - |
What do these numbers tell us? Assuming a well-design process of peer-reviews, quality-assurance and editorial decision-making (which usually needs to be the basis for being incluced in this list) the amount of retractions is quite low if we take in to account the many years of existence and number of papers published in these journals. Of course, there is probably a percentage of papers which have not been idenfified and potentially, these number will be growing due the availability of AI-based writing support.
A surprising finding is the amount of retracted papers of the journal Education and Information Technologies, but there the lack of ethical approval documents seems to lead automatically to retraction. Furthermore, I was surprised to see that besides plagiarism, some papers have been for sale on marketplaces for academic papers.
Marco Kalz
Professor of Educational Technology
My research interests is on open education, pervasive technologies and formative assessment to support (lifelong) learning and knowledge construction.