ArticleQuantitative science studies2022
Continued use of retracted papers: Temporal trends in citations and (lack of) awareness of retractions shown in citation contexts in biomedicine.
Article in Quantitative science studies, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 2 of them syntheses 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
22 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Retractions of Health Economic Evaluations: A Systematic Review.PharmacoEconomics - open · 2026Pooled it
- Inclusion of Retracted Studies in Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.JAMA internal medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Statistical Competence and Editorial Policies in Biomedical Publications.Journal of Korean medical science · 2026Review
- Retraction and correction of scientific articles due to conflicts of interest: a cross‑sectional analysis of the Retraction Watch database.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- Scientific retractions: causes, processes, and implications for research integrity.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Review
- Article
- Scientific publications that use promotional language in the abstract receive more citations and public attention.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Predicting retracted research: a dataset and machine learning approaches.Research integrity and peer review · 2025Article
- Tools of the data detective: A review of statistical methods to detect data and result anomalies in psychology.Theory & psychology · 2025Article
- GenAI synthetic data create ethical challenges for scientists. Here's how to address them.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Linking citation and retraction data reveals the demographics of scientific retractions among highly cited authors.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Transparency, bias, and reproducibility across science: a meta-research view.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2024Article
- Retracted articles in scientific literature: A bibliometric analysis from 2003 to 2022 using the Web of Science.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Characteristics of retracted articles in ophthalmology.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Assessing citation integrity in biomedical publications: corpus annotation and NLP models.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- Reducing the residue of retractions in evidence synthesis: ways to minimise inappropriate citation and use of retracted data.BMJ evidence-based medicine · 2024Article
- Article
- OpCitance: Citation contexts identified from the PubMed Central open access articles.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations from the RISRS report.Research integrity and peer review · 2022Article
- 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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We present the first database-wide study on the citation contexts of retracted papers, which covers 7,813 retracted papers indexed in PubMed, 169,434 citations collected from iCite, and 48,134 citation contexts identified from the XML version of the PubMed Central Open Access Subset. Compared with previous citation studies that focused on comparing citation counts using two time frames (i.e., preretraction and postretraction), our analyses show the longitudinal trends of citations to retracted papers in the past 60 years (1960-2020). Our temporal analyses show that retracted papers continued to be cited, but that old retracted papers stopped being cited as time progressed. Analysis of the text progression of pre- and postretraction citation contexts shows that retraction did not change the way the retracted papers were cited. Furthermore, among the 13,252 postretraction citation contexts, only 722 (5.4%) citation contexts acknowledged the retraction. In these 722 citation contexts, the retracted papers were most commonly cited as related work or as an example of problematic science. Our findings deepen the understanding of why retraction does not stop citation and demonstrate that the vast majority of postretraction citations in biomedicine do not document the retraction.
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.