Cited after retraction
Counting how often a retracted reference appears answers only part of the question. Two sharper questions decide whether anything could have been caught: was the cited paper already retracted when the citing paper was written, and which papers lean on many retracted articles at once?
Timing decides what was catchable
A retraction that lands after a paper was published cannot be a screening failure: there was nothing to catch. The citations that matter for authors and editors are the ones where the cited paper had already been retracted when the manuscript was submitted, or while it was under review. Only those could have been flagged by a reference check. Separating the two needs three dates: the retraction date from the notice record, and the citing paper’s submission and publication dates where the publisher deposits them.
A matched citation records the citation’s presence. It does not show whether the citing paper relies on the retracted result or discusses the retraction itself; that requires reading the paper. It is a statement about a reference list, not an accusation about its authors.
Concentration matters more than a single match
One retracted reference in a long bibliography is common enough to be noise. The pattern integrity researchers inspect is concentration: papers that cite three or more retracted articles, and clusters of papers that lean on the same retracted work. Field matters as well. Some literatures carry far more retracted work than others, so a review in a heavily retracted field will cite more of it without any fault by its authors. The companion study’s journal table shows how widely current-status rates vary between journals.
Method
- Sample: recent journal articles drawn through the Crossref
/worksAPI by ISSN, keeping papers with at least 10 resolvable reference DOIs. - Check: every reference DOI matched against the Retraction Watch Database, whose notices carry dates. Retractions and expressions of concern only; corrections excluded. Each retraction date is compared with the citing paper’s dates to classify whether the reference was already retracted.
- Discipline: citing records that are themselves retraction, expression-of-concern or correction notices are excluded. The analysis reports citation presence, not intent, and never infers misconduct.
- Coverage: retractions recorded only in Crossref and not yet in the Retraction Watch Database are missed, and notice databases can be incomplete.
An earlier version of this page reported figures from a 38,350-paper sample of 2024-2025 papers. We withdrew them on 24 September 2026 because the table behind them was not published for readers to check. The companion study of recent biomedical papers publishes its journal table, CSV and JSON. Please credit the Retraction Watch Database (ISSN 2692-4579) and Crossref when you use notice data.
The free Reference Checker screens your own bibliography for retracted and expression-of-concern references.