The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a huge increase in the publication of biomedical articles. Submissions to Elsevier’s health and medical journals increased by 92% between February and May 2020 over the same period in 2019 (Else, 2020).
As COVID-19 research rapidly evolves, there have been a few notable retractions of published results.
Retraction Watch maintains a running list of COVID-19-related papers that have been withdrawn from publication; however, this issue is far broader and older than the pandemic. Articles may be retracted for a number of reasons, ranging from honest mistakes, to deliberate manipulation of the peer review process, plagiarism, or falsification of data. A 2016 study of articles retracted from BioMed Central journals between 2000 and 2015 found that 76% of the retractions were due to some form of misconduct (Moylan & Kowalczuk, 2016). The reason for a retraction is not always transparent.
Although “[r]etracting problematic articles helps to maintain the accuracy and integrity of the biomedical literature” (Gaudino et al, 2021), several studies have shown that many retracted articles continue to be cited long after they have been withdrawn (Candal-Pedreira et al., 2020; Gaudino et al., 2021; Theis-Mahon & Bakker, 2020). One notorious example of this is the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al., which linked vaccines and autism. It was cited at least 881 times between its partial retraction in 2004 and final retraction in 2010 (Candal-Pedreira et al., 2020).
Authors may unintentionally cite retracted articles for several reasons:
For example, although the retracted status is noted, full text of this retracted article from the New England Journal of Medicine is still available on the journal’s website:
(Mehra, Desai, Kuy, Henry, & Patel 2020)
Citing retracted articles can have serious consequences and, in the case of inaccurate medical research, may even pose risks to patient health (Candal-Pedreira et al., 2020; Teixeira da Silva & Bornemann-Cimenti, 2017).
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) 2018 guidelines for submission to medical journals state that “authors are responsible for checking that none of the[ir] references cite retracted articles except in the context of referring to the retraction” (p.18).
If you are writing for publication, you can check your citation list for retracted articles by:
If you have questions about article retractions, email us at AskLibrary@nshealth.ca or book an appointment with a Library Services staff member.
1. Candal-Pedreira, C., Ruano-Ravina, A., Fernández, E., Ramos, J., Campos-Varela, I., & Pérez-Ríos, M. (2020). Does retraction after misconduct have an impact on citations? A pre-post study. BMJ Global Health, 5(11), e003719. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003719
2. Else, H. (2020, December 16). How a torrent of COVID science changed research publishing — in seven charts. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03564-y
3. Gaudino, M., Robinson, N. B., Audisio, K., Rahouma, M., Benedetto, U., Kurlansky, P., & Fremes, S. E. (2021). Trends and characteristics of retracted articles in the biomedical literature, 1971 to 2020. JAMA Internal Medicine, e211807. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.1807
4. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. (2019, December). Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf
5. Mehra, M. R., Desai, S. S., Kuy, S., Henry, T. D., & Patel, A. N. (2020). Cardiovascular disease, drug therapy, and mortality in Covid-19. The New England Journal of Medicine, 382(25), e102. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621 (Retraction published N Engl J Med. 2020 Jun 4). Screenshot by author.
6. Moylan, E. C., & Kowalczuk, M. K. (2016). Why articles are retracted: a retrospective cross-sectional study of retraction notices at BioMed Central. BMJ Open, 6(11), e012047. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012047
7. Retraction Watch. (2020, December 15). The top retractions of 2020. The Scientist. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/the-top-retractions-of-2020-68284
8. Teixeira da Silva, J.A., Bornemann-Cimenti, H. (2017). Why do some retracted papers continue to be cited? Scientometrics 110, 365–370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2178-9
9. Theis-Mahon, N. R., & Bakker, C. J. (2020). The continued citation of retracted publications in dentistry. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 108(3), 389–397.
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