Citation of retracted papers

Abstract

Scientific and scholarly papers can be retracted either because of honest mistakes, such as inadvertent use of incorrect data, or because of scientific misconduct, such as data falsification, plagiarism, or duplicate publication.In the early 1990s, most retractions were due to honest mistakes, but in recent years about 75% of the retractions have been due to various types of misconduct (Cosentino & Verssimo, 2016;Halevi, 2020).Most retractions take place within a few years after the article was published.In one study, the average time from publication to retraction was 2.5 years (Bar-Ilan & Halevi, 2017).However, longer delays can occur.The record seems to be a delay of 45 years.In 2020, a paediatric case study from 1975 was retracted by its authors because it could not be verified that parental consent had been obtained for the publication (Kozlowski & Turner, 2020).The vast majority of retractions occur in medicine and biomedicine.This does not necessarily imply that research misconduct is particularly common in these areas.Another plausible explanation is that the scrutiny of published data is better developed in health-related research than in other disciplines, not least due to the potential dangers to patients that incorrect medical information can give rise to.Several studies have shown that the inclusion of incorrect information from retracted medical papers in systematic reviews can tilt conclusions in the wrong direction.Such errors can deprive patients of the best available treatment (Avenell et al., 2019a; Avenell et al., 2019b;Marcus et al., 2022;Steen, 2011).The purpose of retracting a publication is to prevent further research and science-based deliberations from being based on it.If that works properly, then we should expect a considerable reduction in references to retracted papers after the retraction has been announced.We should also expect such references to show awareness of the retraction.A retracted paper can legitimately be cited in a discussion of the reason for its retraction.There can also be cases when certain parts of the paper are unaffected by the reasons for the retraction, but uses of those parts as sources of information will require a justification that shows awareness of the retraction.However, retracted papers are cited to a much higher extent and with much fewer references to the retraction than what would be expected if the system worked as it should.This is a problem for all areas of science and scholarship, including philosophy.

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