ArticleResearch integrity and peer review2016
Propagation of errors in citation networks: a study involving the entire citation network of a widely cited paper published in, and later retracted from, the journal Nature.
Article in Research integrity and peer review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Predicting retracted research: a dataset and machine learning approaches.Research integrity and peer review · 2025Article
- Assessing citation integrity in biomedical publications: corpus annotation and NLP models.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- No additional risk of congenital anomalies after first-trimester dydrogesterone use: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Human reproduction open · 2024Review
- Continued use of retracted papers: Temporal trends in citations and (lack of) awareness of retractions shown in citation contexts in biomedicine.Quantitative science studies · 2022Article
- The Citation Cloud of a biomedical article: a free, public, web-based tool enabling citation analysis.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2022Article
- A protocol to gather, characterize and analyze incoming citations of retracted articles.PloS one · 2022Article
- How accurate are citations of frequently cited papers in biomedical literature?Clinical science (London, England : 1979) · 2021Article
- Ten simple rules for navigating the computational aspect of an interdisciplinary PhD.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Article
- A qualitative and quantitative analysis of open citations to retracted articles: the Wakefield 1998 et al.'s case.Scientometrics · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn about one in 10,000 cases, a published article is retracted. This very often means that the results it reports are flawed. Several authors have voiced concerns about the presence of retracted research in the memory of science. In particular, a retracted result is propagated by citing it. In the published literature, many instances are given of retracted articles that are cited both before and after their retraction. Even worse is the possibility that these articles in turn are cited in such a way that the retracted result is propagated further.
methodsWe have conducted a case study to find out how a retracted article is cited and whether retracted results are propagated through indirect citations. We have constructed the entire citation network for this case.
resultsWe show that directly citing articles is an important source of propagation of retracted research results. In contrast, in our case study, indirect citations do not contribute to the propagation of the retracted result.
conclusionsWhile admitting the limitations of a study involving a single case, we think there are reasons for the non-contribution of indirect citations that hold beyond our case study.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.