ABSTRACT
In the context of academic publishing, retraction notices (RNs) are official documents issued to retract problematic research from academic journals. Although there are institutional guidelines for composing RNs, little research has been conducted on the generic components and rhetorical structure of RNs. This chapter reports on a genre-based move analysis of RNs to explore their rhetorical characteristics and how they interact with disciplinary and authorship factors. It draws on a corpus of 255 RNs authored by two different groups of individuals (authors of retracted articles and journal authorities) and published in journals of two broad disciplinary groupings (hard and soft) indexed in the Web of Science (Core Collection). The analysis has identified 18 distinct move types, whose incidence varied widely from 1.57% to 100% of the RNs in the corpus. The employment of nine move types evidenced cross-disciplinary and/or authorship-based differences. The large number of move types found and their widely varying frequencies indicate that RNs as a high-stakes academic genre are still evolving and thus have not acquired a stable generic structure. The cross-disciplinary and authorship-related differences observed indicate that, like other genres, RNs are embedded in particular social contexts and are shaped by specific communicative purposes.
