Analyzing the use of email addresses in scholarly publications

Due to recent fraud cases followed by massive retractions of papers, the authors’ use of institutional versus non-institutional email addresses gained a lot of attention. A database was set up with all email addresses in the by-line of articles and reviews indexed in the Web of Science database. In the period 2017-2021, the usage by corresponding authors of institutional email addresses is much more prolific in the Anglo-Saxon and Western European countries than in the BRICS countries. In the latter, corresponding authors use nearly as often a non-institutional as an institutional email address. The journals’ publishing model does not seem of have a large impact on the type of email address used. Most strikingly is the much more frequent usage of non-institutional email addresses in retracted papers compared to non-retracted papers.