Evolution of retracted publications in the medical sciences: Citations analysis, bibliometrics, and altmetrics trends

An examination of retracted articles in nursing literature

“…More than half of the articles in nursing were retracted because of an actual or a potential ethical concern. This finding is consistent with studies in medicine (Audisio et al, 2022;Bennett et al, 2020;Gaudino et al, 2021;Khademizadeh et al, 2023) and also a scoping review of retractions in nursing (Joaquim et al, 2022) retracted for more than one reason (Gaudino et al, 2021). However, in nursing, only eight of the articles had more than one reason for the retraction.…”

“…The longer it takes to retract an article allows more time for the research to be cited, spreading the potentially inaccurate information through the literature. Studies show that even after retraction, articles continue to be cited (Al-Ghareeb et al, 2018;De Cassai et al, 2022;Khademizadeh et al, 2023;Kühberger et al, 2022;Wadhwa et al, 2021;Xu et al, 2023). In a study of 840 retracted articles, Khademizadeh et al (2023) found that these publications were cited 5659 times in other research articles, with 1559 (27.5%) of the citations occurring postretraction including being shared on Twitter and other online platforms.…”

“…Nearly 70% of the articles had more than one reason for the retraction. In another study of retractions in medicine,Khademizadeh et al (2023) also found that most of these were the result of research misconduct (n = 979, 44.1%), which included fraud, distortion, forgery, manipulation, and fictitious or imaginary data.…”

“…The number of published articles in biomedical fields has continued to increase. As this number has grown, so have retractions of articles (Gaudino et al, 2021;Khademizadeh et al, 2023;Kühberger et al, 2022;Yeo-Teh & Tang, 2021). The Retraction Watch database contains more than 42,000 retractions (Retraction Watch, 2023b).…”