The speed in producing information and the rush to publish scientific articles on COVID-19 in several knowledge areas have resulted in what is known as an infodemic also in the scientific field, potentially producing inaccurate information and sources of misinformation at scholarly communication. This has led to some articles being retracted or withdrawn due to unintentional errors or deliberate misconduct, but they continue to be cited. This article (i) gives an overview of the COVID-19 retracted articles and preprints, and (ii) analyses a set of post-retraction citations in the context of the COVID-19 infodemic. We analyzed 56 retracted articles and preprints by using the list available in the section on “retracted coronavirus (COVID-19) papers” in the Retraction Watch (RW) webpage. We found that 64.3% of these retractions were articles published in journals, 33.9% were uploaded in preprints servers, and 1.8% conference papers. We also analyzed 162 eligible articles out of 612 records identified by using the Google Scholar search engine. This research found that an article from The Lancet continued to be cited even after being retracted. In this case, we identified 214 post-retraction citations, of which 38% were negative (n=81), 32% were neutral (n=69), and 30% were positive citations (n=64)

Over the years, cases of retractions due to unintentional errors or research misconduct have been the subject of discussion, being indispensable to avoid the propagation of misleading information. To understand this matter in the Brazilian scenario, this study characterizes the retractions of authorship or co-authorship of Brazilian researchers between 2002 and 2019, their related consequences and impacts on scientific activity. With a data collection performed at the Retraction Watch database, we analyzed quantitative aspects of the reasons for retractions, stratification by areas of knowledge, the time between publication and retraction, the association of journals and impact factor, authors’ recidivism, the institutional collaboration between Brazilian institutions and countries and funding sources. The results of the analysis of 162 retractions indicate the prevalence of plagiarism (12.2%), the incidence of retracted articles in the Bioscience area (28.1%), in journals with Impact Factors between 2 and 5 (38.0%), and with 2 to 4 authors (38.8%). The occurrences and recurrences of retractions due to misconduct have an impact not only the author’s professional activity but science. Thus, this article emphasizes the importance of prompt retraction, as well as of the need to improve mechanisms to prevent these articles from being published from the start.

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Publications without authorship information have been indexed as anonymous in the Web of Science database over the years. However, discussions on this subject have not been sufficiently addressed in the scholarly literature. Since bibliometrics studies are widely used for bibliometricians, scientific disciplines, science policy, and management, missing significant data as authorship metadata characterizes a gray zone that directly impacts these three components, and by extension, for bibliometrics and scientometrics. With a data collection performed at Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC), 1,420,842 documents under "anonymous" authorship from 1900 to 2021 were retrieved, which accounted for 1.5% of the total documents indexed in the WoSCC. The publication data such as yearly growth of research publications, document type, language, productive research areas, and other bibliometric indicators were analyzed. The findings showed that in absolute numbers, a considerable growth of anonymous publications between 1996 and 2009, and there was a downward trend after that. However, this increase has not been proportional to the growth in the total number of publications indexed in the WoSCC. Articles, editorial materials, and news items were the top three document types among the WoSCC-indexed publications as anonymous. This study also finds two main scenarios of indexing publications as anonymous. The first is associated with the historical context of scholarly communication and practices that persist. The second is characterized by indexing persistent problems. This study suggests minimizing the error in databases, enabling an error-free indexing system and accurate bibliometrics studies.