TY - JOUR
T1 - Continued use of retracted papers: Temporal trends in citations and (lack of) awareness of retractions shown in citation contexts in biomedicine
AU - Hsiao, Tzu-Kun
AU - Schneider, Jodi
N1 - Funding Information:
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation G-2020-12623. NIH 5R01LM010817.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Tzu-Kun Hsiao and Jodi Schneider.
PY - 2021/12/1
Y1 - 2021/12/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Citation analysis
KW - Citation context analysis
KW - Intentional postretraction citation
KW - Postretraction citation PubMed Central Open Access Subset
KW - Retraction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124391184&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85124391184&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/qss_a_00155
DO - 10.1162/qss_a_00155
M3 - Article
C2 - 36186715
SN - 2641-3337
VL - 2
SP - 1144
EP - 1169
JO - Quantitative Science Studies
JF - Quantitative Science Studies
IS - 4
ER -