When I signed on as Editor-in-Chief of PNAS, I had no idea that killing zombies would be part of the job. These zombies aren't the spirits of Haitian mythology doomed to roam the earth in thrall to sorcerers and shamans or the brain-eating undead of contemporary movie and television fame. Rather, in scientific publishing, the phrase “zombie literature” refers to papers, deemed invalid for any number of scientific reasons, that are retracted by the journals that published them yet continue to be cited without any apparent acknowledgment of their lack of validity (e.g., ref. 1). The practice of retracting papers dates back to the early days of scientific publishing; the oldest English-language retraction, for example, is thought to be the note appearing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on June 24, 1756, titled, “A retraction, by Mr. Benjamin Wilson, F.R.S. of his former Opinion, concerning the explication of the Leyden Experiment” (2):

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关于僵尸、斯特鲁布鲁斯和科学文献中的其他恐怖事物[社论]

当我成为《美国国家科学院院刊》的主编时，我并不知道杀死僵尸会成为工作的一部分。这些僵尸并不是海地神话中注定要在大地上徘徊、受制于巫师和萨满的灵魂，也不是当代电影和电视中的食脑不死生物。相反，在科学出版中，“僵尸文学”一词指的是因各种科学原因而被视为无效的论文，这些论文被发表它们的期刊撤回，但仍继续被引用，而没有任何明显的承认其缺乏有效性（例如，参考文献1）。撤回论文的做法可以追溯到科学出版的早期。例如，最古老的英文撤回被认为是 1756 年 6 月 24 日发表在《皇家学会哲学汇刊》上的注释，标题为“皇家学会会员本杰明·威尔逊先生对其之前的意见的撤回，涉及莱顿实验的解释”（2）：