How many scientific papers should be retracted?

In European research today, mobility has become firmly entrenched as a pre requisite for a successful scientific career; however, the reasons behind this emphasis on scientific nomadism are far from obvious. It is all too common for science policy-makers and funding bodies to extol the seemingly endless virtues of mobility, but it nearly amounts to heresy to ponder the possibility that a move abroad might also have drawbacks. It was therefore a breath of fresh air—to those of us who did not change countries the last time we changed jobs—to read Frank Gannon’s recent editorial (Gannon F (2007) The downsides of mobility. EMBO Rep 8: 201). With a healthy dose of realism, Gannon lays out most of the disadvantages of moving, which, unfortunately, are as obvious as they are neglected. These range from losing out in pension schemes and property markets to wasting time and energy on re adjusting to foreign administrative systems and social environments. There are still more factors that should dampen the current unrestrained enthusiasm for mobility: possibly serious language-related difficulties for researchers and their families, loss of support from relatives in raising one’s children and the substantial costs of moving to a foreign country, which are often not reimbursed. Together, these hindrances can be dramatically vexing to the travelling scientist, to the point of seriously impeding his or her research productivity and career development—the officially proclaimed raison d’être for mobility. All this would be acceptable if researchers were free to choose whether or not to move. However, this choice is not really free, as mobility is typically either a major advantage or a crucial requirement for competing for scarce funding in science. Therefore, a brilliant young scientist moving from, say, a PhD position in Edinburgh to a postdoctoral position in Cambridge could lose out against an average researcher relocating from Belgium to Luxembourg, bias for ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘translational research’ or whatever happens to be the trendiest fad of tomorrow.