Citing Retracted Papers Affects Education and Librarianship, so Distorted Academic Metrics Need a Correction

Abstract

A recent paper published in JLSC (Bakker & Riegelman, 2018) noted that the retracted status of 40% of 812 records for 144 retracted papers, including as much as 26.3% of the published PDFs, in the mental health field were not clearly indicated as such. Even though a weak visual indication of the retracted status of a retracted paper limits the necessary information available to the public and readership indicating that such literature should no longer be used or cited, there are other reasons why retracted literature continues to be cited. In this commentary, we reflect on additional factors and explain how this might affect bibliometrics and scientometrics, and thus librarianship and education. Moreover, we make proposals for actions that would be necessary to avoid citing retracted papers and efficiently correct the records where retracted papers have been cited. We introduce a prototype concept of the corrected journal impact factor (cJIF) to correct the most widespread journal-based metric, the Clarivate Analytics journal impact factor (JIF), as a possible solution to correct journal-based metrics that may have become distorted by the citation of retracted papers.

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