Abstract
We present the first database-wide study on the citation contexts of retracted papers, which covers 7,813 retracted papers indexed in PubMed, 169,434 citations collected from iCite, and 48,134 citation contexts identified from the XML version of the PubMed Central Open Access Subset. Compared with previous citation studies that focused on comparing citation counts using two time frames (i.e., preretraction and postretraction), our analyses show the longitudinal trends of citations to retracted papers in the past 60 years (1960–2020). Our temporal analyses show that retracted papers continued to be cited, but that old retracted papers stopped being cited as time progressed. Analysis of the text progression of pre- and postretraction citation contexts shows that retraction did not change the way the retracted papers were cited. Furthermore, among the 13,252 postretraction citation contexts, only 722 (5.4%) citation contexts acknowledged the retraction. In these 722 citation contexts, the retracted papers were most commonly cited as related work or as an example of problematic science. Our findings deepen the understanding of why retraction does not stop citation and demonstrate that the vast majority of postretraction citations in biomedicine do not document the retraction.
Highlights
Retraction is intended to remove published research from the citable literature, retraction does not stop the diffusion of the retracted paper
Compared with previous citation studies that focused on comparing citation counts using two time frames, our analyses show the longitudinal trends of citations to retracted papers in the past 60 years (1960–2020)
In contrast to previous citation context analyses, our analyses reveal the locations of the citation contexts mentioning retracted papers in full-text articles, contribute to the understanding of acknowledgment of retraction shown in citation contexts at scale, and indicate the purposes for intentionally citing retracted papers
Summary
Retraction is intended to remove published research from the citable literature, retraction does not stop the diffusion of the retracted paper. Empirical studies have shown that papers continue to be cited after being retracted (Bar-Ilan & Halevi, 2017; Bolland, Grey, & Avenell, 2021; Candal-Pedreira, Ruano-Ravina et al, 2020; Dal-Ré & Ayuso, 2020; Mott, Fairhurst, & Torgerson, 2019; Pfeifer & Snodgrass, 1990; Theis-Mahon & Bakker, 2020; van der Vet & Nijveen, 2016). Dal-Ré and Ayuso (2020) studied citations to 460 retracted genetics articles and found that 23% of the citations were post-retraction citations. Many citation studies focused on a particular field (e.g., retracted articles in genetics (Dal-Ré & Ayuso, 2020), in dentistry (Theis-Mahon & Bakker, 2020), and in engineering (Rubbo, Pilatti, & Picinin, 2019)). Prior work showed that retracted papers and their authors were penalized with fewer citations, the retracted papers still circulated in scientific communities
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