Continued use of retracted papers: Temporal trends in citations and (lack of) awareness of retractions shown in citation contexts in biomedicine

Hsiao, Tzu‐Kun; Schneider, Jodi

doi:10.1162/qss_a_00155

Cited by 28 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Over 94% of post-retraction citations in biomedicine do not demonstrate awareness that the cited item was retracted [ 24 ]. Users' typical citation workflows may involve citing preprints, reusing downloaded copies, citing older works contained in their reference managers, and copying citations from their own or others' previous bibliographies [ 21 , 22 ].…”

Section: Results: the Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When citing retracted papers, authors frequently do not indicate retraction status in bibliographies or in-text citations. A study of citations to retracted papers in PubMed found that only 5.4% of post-retraction citations acknowledged that the paper they were citing was retracted [ 24 ]. A smaller study, focused on two retracted COVID-19 articles, found that 52.5% of citations did not acknowledge the fact that they were retracted despite the widespread media attention that these retractions received [ 25 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations from the RISRS report

Schneider

Woods

Proescholdt

et al. 2022

Res Integr Peer Rev

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Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs.

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Section: Results: the Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations from the RISRS report

Schneider

Woods

Proescholdt

et al. 2022

Res Integr Peer Rev

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Across the rapidly growing landscape of preprint servers and journals that currently exist, it is unlikely that this occurs reliably. This failure to back-propagate critical information not only leaves preprint readers in the dark about the invalidation of some research, but it could also exacerbate the problem of papers being cited persistently after retraction [ 22 , 23 ]. To be clear, the problem is not with the occurrence of retractions themselves–which should be viewed as an indication that corrective systems are working properly [ 24 ]–but, rather, with the persistence of these papers in the literature due to their continued citation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Downstream retraction of preprinted research in the life and medical sciences

Avissar-Whiting

2022

PLoS ONE

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Retractions have been on the rise in the life and clinical sciences in the last decade, likely due to both broader accessibility of published scientific research and increased vigilance on the part of publishers. In this same period, there has been a greater than ten-fold increase in the posting of preprints by researchers in these fields. While this development has significantly accelerated the rate of research dissemination and has benefited early-career researchers eager to show productivity, it has also introduced challenges with respect to provenance tracking, version linking, and, ultimately, back-propagation of events such as corrigenda, expressions of concern, and retractions that occur on the journal-published version. The aim of this study was to understand the extent of this problem among preprint servers that routinely link their preprints to the corollary versions published in journals. To present a snapshot of the current state of downstream retractions of articles preprinted in three large preprint servers (Research Square, bioRxiv, and medRxiv), the DOIs of the journal-published versions linked to preprints were matched to entries in the Retraction Watch database. A total of 30 retractions were identified, representing only 0.01% of all content posted on these servers. Of these, 11 retractions were clearly noted by the preprint servers; however, the existence of a preprint was only acknowledged by the retracting journal in one case. The time from publication to retraction averaged 278 days, notably lower than the average for articles overall (839 days). In 70% of cases, retractions downstream of preprints were due–at least in part–to ethical or procedural misconduct. In 63% of cases, the nature of the retraction suggested that the conclusions were no longer reliable. Over time, the lack of propagation of critical information across the publication life cycle will pose a threat to the scholarly record and to scientific integrity. It is incumbent on preprint servers, publishers, and the systems that connect them to address these issues before their scale becomes untenable.

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“…Today, content-based citation analysis is used for many different purposes, from citation recommendation systems to citation sentiment analysis (Hsiao & Schneider, 2022;Leng, 2022;Wang et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2022;Yan et al, 2020;Zhang & Zhu, 2022). The future of content-based citation analysis lies in the work to be done with computational linguistic techniques.…”

Section: A Need To Go Beyond Counting: Content-based Citation Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations

Krawczyk¹,

Kulczycki²

2022

Preprint

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This study uses content-based citation analysis to move beyond the simplified category of predatory (or questionable) journals. We present that when we analyze papers not only in terms of the number of their citations but also the content of these citations, we are able to show the much more complicated role of papers published in journals accused of being predatory. We analyzed the content of 9,995 citances from 6,706 papers indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, which cites papers published in so-called questionable journals. The analysis revealed that the vast majority of such citances are neutral (97.3%), and negative citations of articles from questionable journals are almost completely nonexistent (0.8%). Moreover, the analysis revealed that the most frequently mentioned countries in the citances are India, Pakistan, and Iran, and mentions of Western countries are rare. This highlights geopolitical bias and shows the usefulness of looking at such journals as mislocated centers of scholarly communication. Apparently, the analyzed journals provide data needed in mainstream scholarly discussions, and the idea of predatory publishing hides geopolitical inequalities in global scholarly publishing. These findings also contribute to the further development of content-based citation analysis.

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Continued use of retracted papers: Temporal trends in citations and (lack of) awareness of retractions shown in citation contexts in biomedicine

Cited by 28 publications

References 57 publications

Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations from the RISRS report

Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations from the RISRS report

Downstream retraction of preprinted research in the life and medical sciences

Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations

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