Article Text
Abstract
Background Retracted articles continue to be cited after retraction, and this could have consequences for the scientific community and general population alike. This study was conducted to analyse the association of retraction on citations received by retracted papers due to misconduct using two-time frames: during a postretraction period equivalent to the time the article had been in print before retraction; and during the total postretraction period.
Methods Quasiexperimental, pre–post evaluation study. A total of 304 retracted original articles and literature reviews indexed in MEDLINE fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Articles were required to have been published in a journal indexed in MEDLINE from January 2013 through December 2015 and been retracted between January 2014 and December 2016. The main outcome was the number of citations received before and after retraction. Results were broken down by journal quartile according to impact factor and the most cited papers during the preretraction period were specifically analysed.
Results There was an increase in postretraction citations when compared with citations received preretraction. There were some exceptions however: first, citations received by articles published in first-quartile journals decreased immediately after retraction (p<0.05), only to increase again after some time had elapsed; and second, postretraction citations decreased significantly in the case of articles that had received many citations before their retraction (p<0.05).
Conclusions The results indicate that retraction of articles has no association on citations in the long term, since the retracted articles continue to be cited, thus circumventing their retraction.
- health services research
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Handling editor Seye Abimbola
Contributors AR-R and MP-R designed the research. CC-P, AR-R and IC-V extracted information from the databases. CC-P, AR-R and EF designed the statistical analysis and provided ideas on how to present results. AR-R and JR wrote a proposal for the discussion section. CC-P and AR-R wrote a first draft of the manuscript. All authors provided intellectual input on the different versions of the draft. All authors have approved the final version of the manuscript and take public responsibility on its content.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting or dissemination plans of this research.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval In view of the nature of this study, there was no need for ethics committee approval.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon request. All information needed for this study has been obtained from widely known databases, that is, PubMed and Web of Science. Any party interested could replicate the study using the methods provided in our research through extracting data from the mentioned databases.
Author note This work is part of the research conducting to the PhD degree of Cristina Candal-Pedreira.