ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Dynamics of cross-platform attention to retracted papers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 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
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Citations of microRNA Biomarker Articles That Were Retracted: A Systematic Review.JAMA network open · 2024Pooled it
- Article
- Article
- The gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Characterizing the effect of retractions on publishing careers.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- "They Only Silence the Truth": COVID-19 retractions and the politicization of science.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2025Article
- Research Misconduct and Medical Journals.The Journal of law, medicine & ethics : a journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics · 2025Article
- Global burden of ovarian cancer attributable to high body mass index among women of childbearing age from 1990 to 2021 and projections to 2050: a systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2021.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- Cairo Consensus Statement on Research Integrity of Randomised Clinical Trials.Pakistan journal of medical sciences · 2024Article
- Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Potential Issues in Mandating a Disclosure of Institutional Investigation in Retraction Notices.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Review
- An analysis of retracted COVID-19 articles published by one medical publisher with multiple journals.Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center) · 2024Article
- The epidemiology of errors in data capture, management, and analysis: A scoping review of retracted articles and retraction notices in clinical and translational research.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2024Article
- Protection of the human gene research literature from contract cheating organizations known as research paper mills.Nucleic acids research · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Retracted papers often circulate widely on social media, digital news, and other websites before their official retraction. The spread of potentially inaccurate or misleading results from retracted papers can harm the scientific community and the public. Here, we quantify the amount and type of attention 3,851 retracted papers received over time in different online platforms. Comparing with a set of nonretracted control papers from the same journals with similar publication year, number of coauthors, and author impact, we show that retracted papers receive more attention after publication not only on social media but also, on heavily curated platforms, such as news outlets and knowledge repositories, amplifying the negative impact on the public. At the same time, we find that posts on Twitter tend to express more criticism about retracted than about control papers, suggesting that criticism-expressing tweets could contain factual information about problematic papers. Most importantly, around the time they are retracted, papers generate discussions that are primarily about the retraction incident rather than about research findings, showing that by this point, papers have exhausted attention to their results and highlighting the limited effect of retractions. Our findings reveal the extent to which retracted papers are discussed on different online platforms and identify at scale audience criticism toward them. In this context, we show that retraction is not an effective tool to reduce online attention to problematic papers.
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.