Can Twitter data help in spotting problems early with publications? What retracted COVID-19 papers can teach us about science in the public sphere

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought science into mainstream public and political debates in novel ways, notably through the widespread use of social media to share and discuss new findings. In this post, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann discuss their recent findings on how retracted papers were talked about on the social media platform Twitter and how this can be mapped onto the eventual retraction notices of these articles. They suggest that exploring how Twitter and other forms of open post-publication peer review highlight potential errors in the scientific record might serve as an early warning mechanism for spotting research errors