2025/02/10 by Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Karen Santos-d’Amorim, Helmar Bornemann‐Cimenti · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Decision Sciences · #Academic Writing and Publishing #Academic integrity and plagiarism #Academic Publishing and Open Access
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/leap.1667
openalex publication_date 2025/02/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/08
A scientific paper may be retracted due to serious errors, misconduct, or fraud, including plagiarism, duplication, or fabrication, invalid authorship, copyright infringement, or the lack of ethical approvals (Steen, Casadevall, and Fang 2013; Bornemann-Cimenti, Szilagyi, and Sandner-Kiesling 2016; Dal-Ré and Ayuso 2019; Xie, Wang, and Kong 2021; Candal-Pedreira, Pérez-Ríos, and Ruano-Ravina 2022). Historically, about 20% of retracted papers involve collaborative research (Zhang, Abraham, and Fu 2020), affecting a network of individuals. Recently, there has been an increase in retractions linked to paper mills, which are paid services providing data, analyses, or even an entire paper, and whose use is unethical in scientific publishing if those services are undeclared (Rivera and Teixeira da Silva 2021; Day 2022; Pérez-Neri, Pineda, and Sandoval 2022; Santos-d'Amorim et al. 2024; Teixeira da Silva et al. 2024). These papers are retractable due to the undeclared use of such services and the potential inclusion of fake or fabricated data. The number of retractions has amplified considerably from 38 in 2000 to over 2300 in 2020 (Oransky et al. 2021), reaching a new record in 2023 with over 10,000 articles retracted (Van Noorden 2023). Figure 1 displays the steady increase of publications labelled as retracted in the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) databases over the past 30 years. One reason why more literature is not retracted are legal threats to publishers by authors (Sox and Rennie 2006; Oransky 2022). Moreover, a negative stigma and the punitive nature of retractions (Teixeira da Silva and Al-Khatib 2021; Xu and Hu 2024), due to a name-and-shame style culture (Hu and Xu 2023), may stifle academics' desire to correct the literature (Vuong 2020) because retractions can be career-altering or career-terminating events (Mongeon and Larivière 2016; Hu and Xu 2020; Lin 2024). Opinion papers might also be retracted, but if personal or political biases are at play, then such retractions may form part of ‘cancel culture’ in academia (Teixeira da Silva 2021). There is no clear or standard response to this question (Teixeira da Silva 2020), possibly explaining why retracted papers continue to be cited, even though they should theoretically not be (Hansson 2023). However, an answer may lie in the reason why a paper was retracted rather than why it was corrected (Fanelli, Ioannidis, and Goodman 2018). Thus, if a retraction is due to misconduct, then it should not be cited (Neale et al. 2007; Neale, Dailey, and Abrams 2010). The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) advises that ‘[a]rticles that relied on subsequently retracted articles in reaching their own conclusions, such as systematic reviews or meta-analyses, may themselves need to be corrected or retracted’ (COPE 2019). This suggests that the citation of a retracted paper must be individually and carefully considered, especially its use in systematic reviews that provide a concise summary of a topic and that rely on factually accurate and robust information, so as not to mislead their readers (Gray et al. 2018; Faggion Jr. 2019; Herrera-Peco et al. 2020; Shi et al. 2021; Fanelli, Wong, and Moher 2022). Assuming that a retraction represents collective failure on the part of authors, peer reviewers, editors, and/or publishers (Teixeira da Silva 2016a), then one response might be to not cite any retracted literature to avoid any risk to one's reputation, and to not cite erroneous or fraudulent literature (Stern et al. 2014). The expectation is that citations to retracted literature, and attention to papers retracted due to misconduct, should decrease over time (Mistry, Grey, and Bolland 2019; Mott, Fairhurst, and Torgerson 2019). Retraction notices (RNs) are intended to clarify the reasons and background behind retractions but often fail to provide comprehensive explanations (Vuong 2020; Teixeira da Silva and Vuong 2022; Xu and Hu 2022a), most likely because many stakeholders are involved (Xu and Hu 2022b, 2022c). Content variation in RNs tends to occur due to factors such as editorial freedom (Lundberg 1988), unclear ethical guidelines (Bhargava, Vaswani, and Vaswani 2019), potential litigation threats (Moylan and Kowalczuk 2016), the absence of academics in policy-making, or excessive reliance on policy groups (Teixeira da Silva and Vuong 2022). Moreover, the language used in such RNs may be ambiguous, deceptive, or lacking insufficient factual support (Lin and Chen 2022; Lin 2024). Consequently, readers and academics who are meant to be educated by such RNs, so that they can make a decision about whether to cite a retracted paper, are not being properly or fully informed about the risks. A citation, regardless of its validity, serves as a ‘reward’ by recognising the cited paper. However, citations often fail to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ recognition (Bordignon 2020). Some retracted papers accrued more post-retraction citations than before their retraction (Bolboacă et al. 2019; Schneider et al. 2020), suggesting an imperfect mechanism of communication about retractions. Thus, insufficient correction of scientific literature is a driver of citation inflation that can distort impact indicators (Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2018a, 2018b; Dobránszki and Teixeira da Silva 2019; Teixeira da Silva and Vuong 2021). Citing a retracted paper can negatively impact a research field, particularly if widely cited, as it may invalidate claims or findings of subsequent papers (Chen et al. 2013; De Cassai et al. 2023). Post-retraction citations may be intentional or inadvertent, and readers might not always be aware of the reasons why the authors cited those papers (Teixeira da Silva and Bornemann-Cimenti 2017). In a survey, 89% of corresponding authors of papers that cited retracted articles on anaesthesiology and intensive care medicine were not aware of the retracted status of those papers (De Cassai et al. 2022). Of the greatest concern are academics that cite papers that were retracted due to misconduct (Bar-Ilan and Halevi 2017). Retracted literature continues to be cited for several reasons. Authors may believe that their retracted work remains scientifically valid (Madlock-Brown and Eichmann 2015; Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2016), or several findings might still remain valid despite retraction (Azoulay et al. 2015). The retracted status of a paper might not be indicated or visible on the journal websites (Hesselmann et al. 2017; Deculllier and Maisonneuve 2018; Boudry, Howard, and Mouriaux 2023) or scientific databases, including Scopus or WoS (Suelzer et al. 2021). Citing authors may use original (unretracted) copies from the publication's website (Elia, Wager, and Tramèr 2014; Frampton, Woods, and Scott 2021) or archived versions in personal libraries, pirate open access (OA) websites like Sci-Hub, or academic social networks sites, such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate (Davis 2012; Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2017a; Binning, Jutfelt, and Sundin 2018). Reference managers such as Zotero and Endnote aim to reduce such citations by integrating comprehensive databases, such as the Retraction Watch database (Cheng et al. 2019; Dinh, Cheng, and Parulian 2019). By synchronising publications' metadata, it is possible to flag retracted references (Schneider et al. 2022). Although the integration of these tools can be a positive strategy to avoid citations to retracted documents, information in reference managers or bibliographic platforms might be inaccurate or outdated (Suelzer et al. 2021), not indicating a paper as retracted (Bakker and Riegelman 2018; Schmidt 2018), or the ‘retracted’ watermark on the pages of the PDF or HTML text of a retracted paper may be missing (Gray, Al-Ghareeb, and McKenna 2019). Besides these structural reasons, there may also be behavioural factors. Authors might not verify the status of papers prior to submission or might consider the retracted paper's methodology or findings as valid and thus citable (Teixeira da Silva and Bornemann-Cimenti 2017). Authors may intentionally cite retracted papers, for example, in publications that focus on fraud, misconduct, or retractions. Another possibility is when a retracted publication is reproduced or republished after correcting it (Cagney et al. 2016). Several of these reasons explain why some retracted papers continue to be highly cited (Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2017a; Heibi and Peroni 2021). Avenell et al. (2024) suggested that editors and peer reviewers screen the Retraction Watch database of retractions and expressions of concern (EoCs) to assess whether cited literature has been retracted or has an associated EoC. However, EoCs can sometimes take weeks, months, or years to resolve, leaving authors undecided about citing that work (Teixeira da Silva 2023a). Citations link papers from any source, and this is a foundation of knowledge accumulation in academic publishing (Azoulay et al. 2015). A retraction disrupts the trust and legitimacy of this knowledge foundation (Furman, Jensen, and Murray 2012). Erroneous or fraudulent papers cited disseminate correspondingly erroneous or fraudulent information, infecting a network of surrounding literature (Teixeira da Silva 2024). The academic community is more sensitised to this issue when such papers involve medical information (Budd et al. 1999) since the assumption is that the health of the public (including patients) might in some way be at risk of harm if the retracted data serve as the basis for further research (Steen 2011; Marcus, Abritis, and Oransky 2022; Teixeira da Silva 2022a) because, in clinical practice, evidence forms the basis of clinical governance (Dawes and Sampson 2003; Mikalef, Kourouthanassis, and Pateli 2017; Khademizadeh et al. 2024). Authors that actually read and cite such papers do so consciously, but if citations are planted into a paper, for example, by paper mills, then damage the scientific literature's integrity is two-fold: first, the illicit use of a paper mill; second, the ‘plantation’ of citations into a paper for a price. In the latter case, editors, copy editors, journals, and publishers must complete thorough quality control prior to publication to (1) ensure that retracted literature is not cited or, if it is, that its citation is validated and (2) identify citations that are irrelevant to the content of a paper. If a paper that cites an erroneous or fraudulent paper is not corrected (Teixeira da Silva 2015), then subsequent citations (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.) cumulatively ‘reward’ it (Bar-Ilan and Halevi 2018). In the worst-case scenario, a highly cited erroneous or fraudulent paper ‘infects’ a large body of literature, thereby biasing its information (Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2017a). Papers retracted for plagiarism or publisher error do not negatively impact ‘surrounding’ literature as much as those retracted for fraud and misconduct, and the potential damage is greater when retracted papers are cited in ‘hot’ fields of research (Azoulay et al. 2015) or in reputable journals or publishers, such as Nature, Science, and Cell (Wang and Su 2024), that is, those that claim to adhere to community or industry standards (e.g., peer review), codes of ethical conduct (e.g., COPE or International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines), indexing (WoS, Scopus, PubMed/Medline, etc.) or metrics (Clarivate impact factor (IF), Elsevier/Scopus CiteScore). As a theoretical example, a fraudulent paper published in a COPE-adhering, Scopus-indexed and IF-carrying journal, if retracted but cited by 100 similar quality journals, corrupts the literature 100-fold at the first level of citation due to the citation network (van der Vet and Nijveen 2016), despite adherence to ethics, indexing and quality control controls. Even the five-fold citation of 1000 papers may impact as many as 5000 papers (primary impact), and even more papers that cite the citing paper (secondary, tertiary, etc., impact), creating a ‘domino effect’ (Leta, Araujo, and Treiber 2022). However, dominoes imply a knock-down or erasure effect, akin to losing citations over time (Yang et al. 2024). Therefore, we prefer to think of the impact of amplified citation to retracted literature more like the growth of bacterial or fungal colonies that continue to propagate provided that they are offered sustained nutrients, which, in this imagery, is academic interest or reliance. Downstream citations can thus provide an unfair citation advantage (Schneider et al. 2020), and the extent to which that retracted literature distorts the scientific validity of downstream citing papers by biasing their scientific validity can be seen as an ‘epistemic’ cost (Fanelli, Wong, and Moher 2022). With tens of thousands of papers retracted in biomedical science (Oransky 2022), the literature becomes a patchwork of erroneous and fraudulent information (Teixeira da Silva 2024), blurring the lines between valid and invalid, accurate and inaccurate, and truth and falsehood. Moreover, literature should not be permanently deleted—despite arguments to the contrary by some (Kühberger, Streit, and Scherndl 2022; Rzymski 2022)—as this may constitute poor librarianship and disrupt the permanence of scientific and biomedical knowledge, although the archival of erroneous literature ensures its permanence and its effective amplification (Davis 2012). At some point, the literature might become irretrievably corrupted if the volume of retracted papers exceeds a threshold. At that point, even if there are measures to correct the literature (Teixeira da Silva 2022b), the sheer mass of negatively impacted literature may become so large that trust, an essential aspect of publishing, may become irretrievably lost. Consequently, as the mass of retracted papers on platforms such as PubMed accumulates, their reliability as sources of biomedical literature diminishes (Teixeira da Silva 2023b). The same applies to WoS (Fahimifar, Ghorbi, and Ausloos 2022), Scopus (Bolland, Grey, and Avenell 2022), Google Scholar, and other major private or public databases that serve as reliable sources of scientific information (Fanelli, Wong, and Moher 2022). Highly cited papers can extensively ‘corrupt’ the literature if they contain erroneous or misleading information (Heibi and Peroni 2021). Uncorrected citations to fraudulent literature contribute to misinformation, and deliberate actions amount to disinformation. What, then, is the threshold or point-of-no-return when the mass of such papers critically influences the integrity of the indexed information or the reliability of the index itself? Ultimately, consciously or not, even that has been retracted can be promoted through citation, and it is the responsibility of editors, journals, and publishers to ensure that literature is corrected. Absent proper and responsible editorial action to address this issue, and to inform and educate the academic community about a paper's flaws that led to its retraction, via transparent RNs, journals and/or their information management may be relegated to the status of ‘junk’ because it involves an irresponsible approach towards the integrity of the knowledge base (Teixeira da Silva 2023c). We dwell momentarily on the issue of how the scientific literature is corrected and the mechanisms currently in place to correct it. These mechanisms are constantly evolving (Teixeira da Silva 2016b; Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2017b), in some ways adjusting to meet the demands and challenges that face academic publishing in the light of new forms of fraud, risks, and threats, seeking novel ways to decipher honest from dishonest error, mild from serious errors, or error from misconduct or fraud Wang, and Kong 2021; Teixeira da Silva These mechanisms are still and they are still and because they to be to a of literature that from new including through the actions of peer and 2023). the of structural guidelines to address and correct erroneous or fraudulent literature, may be or and Avenell 2019; Xu et al. 2023), journals do not always some to claim that the of correction is due to lack of and in policy editorial and/or even COPE 2018; Bolland et al. 2021; Grey, and Bolland 2024). address a and permanently the paper's including and information (Teixeira da Silva and 2022). This in the science and of the background of that paper, positive and is not that one of the are not always or (Teixeira da Silva and 2024), leaving academics who to cite papers with an associated undecided as to whether those papers are scientifically and whether they should be cited (Teixeira da Silva and 2021; Grey, and Bolland 2022). a readers not to cite work their scientific an serves as a retraction readers to cite with or to critically information prior to use and 2017). As by the editors and peer reviewers should screen references in papers for retracted literature, authors should the use of retracted literature or provide an as to why such citation is This that a of retracted papers in biomedical These are in are in which they been This as a science in has a with been over and and an of the and that despite the of correcting the scientific record through RNs, retracted articles in the biomedical continue to be The of the first on post-retraction citation (Schneider et al. 2020). and citations from publications by between and Science and data. the of of their scientific that of the collective were years after their retraction, those articles to be cited 2010). and that although a retraction the number of of retracted articles to even one after the Marcus, and a of retractions due to than misconduct retracted articles indexed in between and In a case, Scott papers with fabricated data were cited in as many as systematic and one in might they not such et al. By of retracted papers citations Szilagyi, and Sandner-Kiesling 2016). Of the citations accrued in a for retracted papers, of the sources citing these retracted papers indicated their retracted status et al. 2022). WoS citation data indexed between and Neale, Dailey, and Abrams no between the volume of citations to articles by misconduct to articles in the control PubMed data, authors in misconduct that the of information in databases to fraudulent et al. an in citations by a body of retracted papers published PubMed and data between and et al. also that retracted papers to be cited, by an published in that was retracted after also that the time to retraction with the findings of Jensen, and Murray et al. retracted biomedical papers indexed on PubMed, published in or and retracted no than a in citations to a body of Of retracted publications that were cited by papers, of indicated the retracted of those papers and 2020). Avenell et al. et al. Bolland et al. the of of from a in that led at the time of publication of that paper, retractions. on this and those papers published between and linked to with as an and published in journals with an they first that the papers were retracted between and but accrued citations by Avenell et al. papers that cited these papers, but not any concern about the Avenell et al. that the in of likely retraction a biomedical who data, that the citation of retracted papers it was not from Schneider et al. that a retracted on a medical to be cited even years after the et al. that retractions in the in journals with an and Faggion Jr. (2024) articles indexed in PubMed, and Scopus, plagiarism as the most reason for retraction and their poor and that of retractions in biomedical research involved as the first and authors in articles indexed in Retraction Watch between and and that of retracted papers were cited in systematic with of these citations before Dal-Ré and Ayuso that of citations to retracted papers accrued In et al. on retracted articles indexed in a post-retraction increase in citations to the with and misconduct more in et al. who Retraction retractions in the between and that most retractions in journals with an and Faggion Jr. (2024) the quality of articles indexed in PubMed, and Scopus, plagiarism as the most and that the quality of those and that of retractions in biomedical research in articles indexed in Retraction Watch in and as the first and retraction an lack of scientific validity, the increase of post-retraction citations has on the of retracted papers, creating a The extent of the on the citation of retracted papers remains 2021). citation standards might on the research field, journals, and and and and 2021), to this A of may the scientific literature and Fang from at the level of an to intentional and at the et al. 2021). for academic and Schneider 2021) or analyses, the citation of retracted literature is likely not a This is because those papers were retracted due to some of a or ethical There are reasons why academics continue to cite retracted literature, one of being the that information in such papers is valid and thus to policy on how such literature should be cited and how such cited literature should be corrected is (Schneider et al. 2022). also need to be involved in the associated with the correction of the literature and 2022). we do not for the of retracted papers from the that is, 2022), even though this has been as one way for science to (Kühberger, Streit, and Scherndl 2022). The authors to literature and The authors no of is not to this as no new data were or in this