I will answer based on my specific experience at Cell Reports, a primary research journal. I will not claim to speak for all primary research journals, but I think you can assume that my positions are in fact representative of journals in the life sciences and probably of journals in all of the hard sciences. I consider it obvious that the scientific peer-reviewed literature is substantially different from other kinds of writing and literature.
Many of the answers to these questions can be found in the work of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), of which Cell Press (and hundreds/thousands of publishers and societies) is a member.
There is a big difference. Corrections leave the literature intact, and are made with the premise that the uncorrected article was still valid overall. The Correction text identifies the error and how it came about, then provides the corrected text/data. The Correction is linked to the original article explicitly.
Retractions remove articles from the literature. They do this openly. I think everyone finds a retraction to be “more serious” than a correction.
Between a straightforward correction (say, one that corrects a substantive error in a figure or table) and an all-out retraction (say, one that removes a fraudulent article from the literature) there lies a range of errors and problems that require subjective judgment. The main criterion is centrality of the error to the argument in the paper, which is related to “severity” I guess. Other criteria include more subjective judgments about overall trustworthiness of the work, and let’s be open here: errors that suggest negligence or incompetence can and should be judged differently from what we should call honest mistakes. There are no checklists or rubrics by which these judgments are made, but there are guidelines established with great care by COPE; when I face situations like this, I confer with colleagues and sometimes convene a committee of other editors to consider and judge the response to a paper containing errors.
See above for how they are different. I don’t know what anyone means by “handled” but both corrections and retractions involve these two questions: 1) is there an error that needs to be dealt with? 2) If so, how should it be dealt with?
Yes, of course promptness is important. In some cases (cf. the bogus “data” put on bioRxiv about the Wuhan coronavirus), “prompt” means days. In other cases, there might be less urgency. It depends on the error, but in these days of online publication, there are few good reasons to delay a correction. But the truly complicated scenarios all concern retraction and not correction. If a journal suspects a paper to be unreliable, and is considering retraction, it is obligated to engage a process that is nearly impossible to do in a matter of days or weeks. For this reason, something called an “editorial expression of concern” can be used: the journal attaches this notice to the paper, announcing that the journal has some concerns that are serious enough to warrant scrutiny (i.e. an investigation) but which are unresolved. Nevertheless (and this has not yet happened to me as an editor-in-chief), if/when there is clear urgency (an error that endangers people, for example), the process can and should be expedited.
First, I know perfectly well that you are building a garden path on which to bash BioLogos, and I think all readers of this conversation should keep that in mind. I considered deleting all of my responses at this point, because I’m unwilling to be a part of your cynical and selfish game. I’m tagging @glipsnort here specifically, not to solicit a response but to signal my discomfort with your behavior and to make sure at least one other participant at BioLogos sees this.
I don’t think there should be a different standard for correction when talking to the general public, but I also don’t think that the challenges of communicating science in 2020 have anything at all to do with corrections or retractions. Consider a case in point, which I think illustrated exemplary conduct by a journal (my friends and colleagues at Current Biology). [Disclosure: these are indeed both friends and colleagues, which should be noted as readers consider my words.] The journal published a paper on effects of religion on altruism. Then, months later, they published a reanalysis of that paper, by different authors, which invalidated some of the findings of the original paper. The verdict was clear: the main conclusion of the original paper, which garnered major news coverage, was wrong. The data were fine, but the conclusion was wrong. The original paper was retracted.
Here’s why the story is relevant here. Science worked just as it should. The original authors made an error in their analysis. A second group requested, and received, the raw data, reanalyzed it, and demonstrated the error. The paper showing the error was published in the same journal as the original paper. All good, right? Wrong. In the popular media, there was no correction or retraction. Years after the result was known to be wrong, it was being cited in blogs and news pieces. Science did its part to correct the mistake, but the cat was out of the bag–more accurately, a millions cats were out of the bag, and there is just no way to round them up. My point being: you are deluded if you think that scientific processes of error correction–retractions and corrections in the literature–can adequately influence truth and error in a population unequipped to detect even the most blatant of lies.
But with all that said (and shit, sorry this is way too long), when I blogged regularly, I did corrections, and tagged them as such, and even invited “peer review” of a few of my posts. Maybe because I’m a scientist who has been immersed in the literature for more than 3 decades, I was unwilling to delete posts entirely once they had been published and certainly not after they had been commented on or linked to by others. Blogs, of course, are easy to revise. If I ran a website that published articles on science, I would on principle never delete an article and would instead follow processes akin to correction and retraction at journals like Cell Reports.