studies about retractions – Retraction Watch

Just over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers

Around 400 U.S. patents contain at least one citation to a retracted scientific paper, a new study has found.

The analysis, posted last month to the preprint server SSRN, analyzed granted patents in the United States in PatentsView, a database developed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) using artificial intelligence algorithms, and the Retraction Watch Database.

Of the more than 13 million patents in the USPTO database, 136,162 contained citations to at least one scientific paper. Of these, 401 patents cited retracted papers: 195 cited the retracted paper before it was filed, 92 cited papers retracted while being examined, and 114 cited a paper that was retracted after the patent was granted, the study revealed.

Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds

Retracted scientific papers cited on Wikipedia tend to linger on the popular website for years, according to a study examining nearly 1,200 citations.

The study’s authors, led by Ph.D. candidate Haohan Shi from the Media, Technology, and Society Program at Northwestern University, used the Retraction Watch Database to compile a list of retracted papers and cross-referenced that list with Wikipedia citations. Of the 1,181 retracted citations identified, just over half were added to Wikipedia before the paper was retracted; a fifth were added after retraction but without any reader warning; and just over a quarter explicitly noted the retraction.

They also measured how long it took the Wikipedia community to correct citations added before the paper was retracted. The team found that while many corrections occurred swiftly, the median time for a correction was 3.68 years.

New system for flagging retracted papers finds scores of them in Cochrane reviews

Cochrane has implemented a new system for checking whether any of its thousands of published reviews include retracted studies in their analyses, the organization announced today. The effort already has turned up dozens of reviews that do and will now get closer scrutiny to ensure their results and recommendations hold up.

Cochrane publishes systematic reviews on health-related topics that evaluate the strength of evidence on particular treatments and interventions. Professional organizations and policymakers use the more than 9,500 reviews when developing recommendations. Recently a study of anesthesia clinical trials found a high rate of the studies with faked or flawed data, and another revealed that retracted studies included in systematic reviews — 17% of which were Cochrane reviews — had a large impact on clinical guidelines derived from them.

Last year, Cochrane rolled out a feature in its database of reports of clinical trials, called CENTRAL, to flag retracted studies. The publisher pulls data on retracted papers from the Retraction Watch Database, via CrossRef. Now, they have extended the process to routinely identify systematic reviews that rely on retracted papers.

Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds

Among the data analyzed were mean monthly citations per article for 151 papers that were retracted or issued some other editorial notice, and for a set of control articles. The solid vertical lines are median time to the peak citation month, and the dashed line is median time to the editorial notice.
*H. Studd et al/medRxiv 2026*

Neither retractions, expressions of concern, nor other editorial notices seem to keep authors from continuing to cite problematic papers, according to a look at what happened to more than 170 articles by one author.

“After the public notification of integrity concerns about an article, it would be expected that other authors would no longer cite the article because it is unreliable,” write the authors of a new preprint. But that’s not what they found in a limited comparative study. Whether the study is generalizable has yet to be seen, says one other expert.

Four sleuths – the University of Aberdeen’s Hugo Studd and Alison Avenell and the University of Auckland’s Andrew Grey and Mark J. Bolland – charted citation data for 172 papers on clinical trials from Zatollah Asemi, a nutrition researcher at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, whose work has come under scrutiny.

Why don’t journalists circle back to cover retractions? A conversation with Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Documentation, a team of researchers in journalism, social science and data explore how and why journalists report – or don’t report – on scientific retractions.

The investigators performed an analysis on news coverage of “high-attention retracted articles” identified from the Retraction Watch database and other sources and also interviewed journalists from the U.K. and Finland to gain a cross-cultural perspective.

The lead author of the paper, Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson, of the University of Sheffield’s School of Information, Journalism and Communication, took questions from us about the work.

AI unreliable in identifying retracted research papers, says study

LLMs don’t reliably identify retracted papers, a new study finds. *(Image: DALL-E)*

Large language models should not be used to weed out retracted literature, a study of 21 chatbots concludes. Not only were the chatbots unreliable at correctly identifying retracted papers, they spit out different results when given the same prompts.

The “very simple study,” as lead author Konradin Metze called it, used LLM chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and others to see whether they would successfully identify retracted articles in a list of references.

Metze and colleagues compiled a list of 132 publications. The list comprised the 50 most cited, retracted papers by Joachim Boldt, a prolific German researcher who also sits at the top of the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Another 50 were Boldt’s most cited non-retracted papers. The rest were works by other researchers with the last name “Boldt” and first initial of “J.” The study authors prompted each chatbot to indicate which of the listed references had been retracted.

Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says

The observed and forecasted growth rate of paper mill papers outpaces corrective measures, a new study finds. *R. Richardson et al./PNAS 2025*

Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating, according to a study of problematic publishing practices and the networks that fuel them.

The study, published August 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined research fraud carried out by paper mills, brokers and predatory publishers. By producing low quality or fabricated research, selling authorship and publishing without adequate quality control and peer review, respectively, these three groups were well known to produce a large volume of fraudulent research.

“This is a great paper showing how much fraud there is in the scientific literature. The paper also looks at different methods on how to detect problematic papers, networks and editors,” Anna Abalkina, a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, said.

Do men or women retract more often? A new study weighs in

The male/female retraction ratio for Zheng and colleagues’ dataset showed that male first authors have a higher retraction rate than females. *Source: E-T Zheng et al/*J of Informetrics 2025

When you look at retracted papers, you find more men than women among the authors. But more papers are authored by men than women overall. A recent study comparing retraction rates, not just absolute numbers, among first and corresponding authors confirms that men retract disproportionally more papers than women.

The paper, published May 20 in the Journal of Informetrics, is the first large-scale study using the ratio of men’s and women’s retraction rates, said study coauthor Er-Te Zheng, a data scientist at The University of Sheffield. The researchers also analyzed gender differences in retractions across scientific disciplines and countries.

Zheng and his colleagues examined papers from a database of over 25 million articles published from 2008 to 2023, about 22,000 of which were retracted. They collected the reasons for retraction from the Retraction Watch Database, and used several software tools to infer each author’s gender based on name and affiliated country.

How do retractions impact researchers’ career paths and collaborations?

About 46% of authors leave their publishing careers around the time of a retraction, a new study has found.
*SA Memon et al/Nat Hum Behav 2025*

Several studies have tackled the issue of what effect a retracted paper has on a scientist’s reputation and publication record. The answer is, by and large, it depends: The contribution the researcher made on the paper, their career stage, the field of study and the reason for the retraction all play a role.

Three researchers from New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi wanted to better understand how a retraction affects a scientist’s career trajectory and future collaborations. Using the Retraction Watch Database, they looked at papers retracted between 1990 and 2015, and merged that data with Microsoft Academic Graph to generate information on researchers’ pre- and post-retraction publication patterns, as well as their collaboration networks. They also looked at Altmetric scores of retractions to factor in the attention a retraction got.

From that data, they extrapolated if and when researchers with retracted papers left scientific publishing, and looked for trends in researchers’ collaboration networks before and after the retraction.

Do men or women retract more? A study found the answer is … complicated

A new study compares retraction rates between men and women.
*Pexels*

Longtime Retraction Watch readers know the scientists on our Leaderboard have changed over the years. But one characteristic has remained relatively constant: There are few women on that list – in fact, ~~never~~ rarely more than one at a time.

So when a recent paper dove into whether retraction rates vary by the gender of the authors, we were curious what the authors found.

The team, from Sorbonne Study Group on Methods of Sociological Analysis (GEMASS) in Paris, sampled 1 million articles from the OpenAlex database, then referenced the Retraction Watch database to compare against their sample.

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