by Zach Coble
Authors: John M. Budd, Zach C. Coble and Katherine M. Anderson
Presented at ACRL 2011, April 1, 2011.
Full text at http://s3.goeshow.com/acrl/national/2011/client_uploads/handouts/retracted_publications.pdf
Retractions of articles and citations to retracted work continue to be a cause for concern. In 1999, Budd et al. found... more
Retractions of articles and citations to retracted work continue to be a cause for concern. In 1999, Budd et al. found 235 retracted publications in the biomedical literature for a 30-year period. Nearly 40% were retracted because of misconduct. The current study found 1,164 retracted articles in the 12-year period between 1997 and 2009. Of the 1,112 articles included for analysis, 55% were retracted for some type of misconduct. While this number represents a small minority of the total number of publications in biomedicine, it is still substantial, and the impact of the retracted works can be significant. In PubMed, notifications of retractions are connected to the original publication; the retraction information appears when a retracted article is retrieved in a search. Citations to retracted articles should, theoretically, be minimal. Despite these notifications of retraction in PubMed and elsewhere, the articles continue to receive citations. The 1999 study found that the retracted articles received more than 2,000 post-retraction citations, with less than 8% of the citations acknowledging the retraction in any way. Preliminary examination of the present data set illustrates that continued citation remains a problem. Of 391 citations analyzed, only 6% acknowledge the retraction. Because of potential clinical and research implications of continued use of work retracted due to error and (especially) misconduct, the current study is intended to alert information professions and information users about the challenges inherent in the literatures of many fields, particularly biomedicine
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