The UK Research Integrity Office has issued new guidelines on retractions of journal articles (H/T COPE). I thought it was interesting to compare the guidelines to the events surrounding Phil Jones' 1990 paper on urban heat islands, which is now of course the subject of a fraud allegation from Doug Keenan. Keenan's claim is that Jones continued to cite the paper even when he knew that some of the underlying data could not be relied upon. Jones' defence is that a subsequent paper he published has shown the findings to be broadly correct.
UKRIO says that papers should be retracted
when there is clear evidence that the reported findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct, such as fabrication of data, or honest error, for example. miscalculation or experimental error;
I think on the basis of this statement, Jones would still argue that the findings were reliable since they were backed up by his later study. However AFAIK, there was a gap of several years in the middle when Jones knew of the problems with his 1990 paper, but hadn't yet published his new findings. This suggests that his conduct at the time was not up to the standards required by these new guidelines (although I am not aware of what rules applied at the time).
The guidelines also make the interesting point that one of the reasons for retraction is so as not to bias future meta-analyses:
A retraction can help reduce the number of researchers who cite an erroneous article, act on its findings or draw incorrect conclusions, such as from ‘double counting’ redundant publications in meta-analyses.
It is therefore interesting to consider the effect of Jones 1990 on any metaanalysis of UHI papers. One assumes that such a study would still pick up Jones 1990 because it has never been retracted. It therefore seems to me that it is incumbent upon Jones to retract the paper, even at this late stage.