Citation inflation: the effect of not correcting the scientific literature sufficiently, a case study in the plant sciences

Abstract

In forestry, the Pterocarpus genus is important for the wood industry as this is a tree that is highly valued for its timber. Biotechnological research on this tree genus therefore needs to be carefully examined, even at the post-publication stage. In this paper, we examine how a near-duplicate copy of a 2004 paper published in a leading plant science and biotechnology Springer Nature journal, In Vitro Cellular and Developmental Biology—Plant, was corrected, rather than retracted. The near-duplicate paper has been cited a total of 16 times, according to the Web of Science, and since 2015, when the paper was first corrected, four citations have emerged. These additional citations for the corrected paper support our claim that the corrected paper should have been retracted, i.e., that the literature was insufficiently corrected, which may have prevented the citation of this near-duplicate paper. Readers who cited the near-duplicate paper after the erratum had been published were either unaware of the correction, or ignored it. Post-publication peer review needs to be more integrated into the publishing framework. We suggest a corrective mechanism by Clarivate Analytics to correct the journal impact factor to avoid citation inflation.