Introducing retractophilia and retractophobia, and an appreciation of the silent "victims" of retracted papers.

The pressure placed on all stakeholders in academic publishing by post-publication peer review (PPPR), coupled with ethics and structural reforms taking place in journals, are leading to a rise in retractions. It is thus expected that the agents of PPPR (e.g., sleuths) will collide with their targets (e.g., authors, editors, publishers). Those collisions with the status quo and challenges to the published literature may result in conflicts between stakeholders. In the context of PPPR, the outcome of conflict resolution is often the retraction of publications. In this paper, the terms retractophilia and retractophobia are introduced to represent the desire to ensure that retractions occur or the fear that a retraction takes place, respectively. Citations tend to be incremental, so they serve as indirect forms of rewards in a citation-based culture that then feeds bibliometric indicators such as the H-index. Even though a paper is retracted, the citations in its reference list remain standing, i.e., the recipients of a citation, namely the authors of papers that appear in the reference list of a retracted paper, do not suffer an equivalent "loss" of a citation, so their H-index is unaffected. Since a negative effect is neither felt nor observed, the recipients of citations, i.e., the authors of papers that appear in the reference lists of retracted papers, are rewarded a citation, but from an "undesirable" (i.e., retracted) publication. There are currently no corrective measures in place to formally deal with this situation. However, as more austere measures are put into place to curb "unfair" citation practices, metrics, like the H-index, may begin to subtract citations that appear in retracted literature, making those whose work was cited "silent" victims. Academics must pay closer attention to the growing culture of retractions, and appreciate its impact on them, their work environment, and careers.