Scrutable

New research has looked into the citations that Wakefield's retracted paper still receive and Retraction Watch has an interview with the authors.

They found that most of the citations were in the context of how the paper has influenced public perception of vaccines and increased anti-vax sentiment and it was referenced in a negative way.

One finding of concern was that a substantial proportion did not report the fact the paper has been retracted. They note that,

The retraction of the Wakefield study is very well known and if authors are failing to note the retracted status of this article, we are concerned that lesser known retracted articles are being cited without documenting their retraction

The authors raise the problem of citation managers not flagging that papers that have been retracted, and how the current system puts the onus on academics to be pro-active and be aware of retractions. They discuss work they have done with Zotero to automatically update citations with retraction notices which sounds like a fantastic idea, and one that hopefully other reference managers can also develop, and extend to cover errata as well.

Interesting article.

Surely hard to be aware enough to cite Fraudy-Pants yet not be aware his work was retracted? Unless the article is saying they just didn't state it was retracted rather than not knowing.

Looking at the paper (which is open access), I think they were trying to see how many papers follow best practice guidelines on dealing with retracted papers.

The second aim of this study was to record whether the retractions were accurately documented. The ICMJE recommendations for manuscript preparations suggest that authors are responsible for ensuring that reference lists are accurate, that authors use PubMed as an authoritative source for information about retractions, and that authors should note the retracted status of the article in the citation when citing a retracted article.13 Despite these recommendations, 142 of the 502 citing works (28.3%) published after 2011 did not document either retraction or note the retracted status in the citation.

mikeh wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 18, 2019 9:17 pm

Interesting article.

Surely hard to be aware enough to cite Fraudy-Pants yet not be aware his work was retracted? Unless the article is saying they just didn't state it was retracted rather than not knowing.

Perhaps the authors of articles on how Wakefield’s paper influenced public perception of vaccines etc assume that among the readers the retraction is already common knowledge and so doesn’t need to be stated explicitly.

That would seem extremely foolish in articles and papers that you hope will be read and cited for decades.

dyqik wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 19, 2019 11:27 am

That would seem extremely foolish in articles and papers that you hope will be read and cited for decades.

Positively undermining. We might wonder where else in their papers an attitude of "Oh, we just assumed you'd know that" applied.