How often do recent papers cite retracted research?
We checked the reference lists of 12,402 recent (2025) papers across 54 major biomedical journals — 744,770 individual citations in all — against the Retraction Watch database and Crossref’s retraction notices, the same data behind our free reference-integrity checker. Here is what we found, with the method and named examples so you can check it yourself.
What this means (and what it doesn’t)
A paper isn’t wrong because one of its references was later retracted. Retractions often land after a citing paper is written, and the citing authors usually had no way to know. The point is narrower and more useful: at submission time, nobody ran a check that would have caught it — and that check now takes seconds. When the cited work has been retracted for data manipulation or unreliable results, a citation that still leans on its original finding is a real problem a reviewer can flag.
We lead with the 1.4% retracted-or-EoC number rather than the headline 7.1%, because “correction” is the lowest-severity flag (an erratum is not misconduct) and the most common — 783 of the flagged references were corrections, versus 162 retractions and 25 expressions of concern. Both numbers are a conservative lower bound: this run did not include the production engine’s hijacked-journal clone-domain check.
The problem is concentrated in lab-based fields
The corpus average hides a sharp gradient by field. Cell and cancer biology run far above it — Cancer Cell 16.4%, Cell 15.4%, Cell Reports 14.7%, Cancer Research 14.4%, with immunology (Immunity 12.4%, Nature Immunology 10.9%) close behind. Clinical medicine sits near the floor: the New England Journal of Medicine 2.3%, JAMA 2.8%, Annals of Internal Medicine 2.5%, The Lancet Oncology 1.3%. The fields where data integrity has been most contested are the same fields whose recent papers most often carry a flagged reference. If you work in cell biology, oncology, or immunology, your bibliography’s base rate is roughly five times a clinical journal’s.
By journal
| Journal | Sampled | Papers w/ flag | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nature Reviews Immunology | 42 | 9 | 21.4% |
| Nature Reviews Drug Discovery | 30 | 5 | 16.7% |
| Cancer Cell | 128 | 21 | 16.4% |
| Cell | 305 | 47 | 15.4% |
| Cell Reports | 306 | 45 | 14.7% |
| Cancer Research | 291 | 42 | 14.4% |
| Journal of Experimental Medicine | 158 | 20 | 12.7% |
| Diabetes | 182 | 23 | 12.6% |
| Immunity | 178 | 22 | 12.4% |
| American Journal of Human Genetics | 166 | 19 | 11.4% |
| Nature Immunology | 183 | 20 | 10.9% |
| Neuron | 232 | 25 | 10.8% |
| Molecular Cell | 274 | 27 | 9.9% |
| Developmental Cell | 205 | 20 | 9.8% |
| Science Translational Medicine | 255 | 24 | 9.4% |
| Nature Biotechnology | 163 | 15 | 9.2% |
| eLife | 289 | 26 | 9.0% |
| Nature Genetics | 264 | 22 | 8.3% |
| Nature | 294 | 24 | 8.2% |
| Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications | 297 | 24 | 8.1% |
| Journal of Immunology | 306 | 23 | 7.5% |
| Journal of Cell Biology | 209 | 15 | 7.2% |
| Nature Communications | 303 | 21 | 6.9% |
| Journal of Biological Chemistry | 306 | 21 | 6.9% |
| PLOS Genetics | 295 | 20 | 6.8% |
| Nature Neuroscience | 208 | 14 | 6.7% |
| PLOS Biology | 308 | 19 | 6.2% |
| Nature Methods | 227 | 14 | 6.2% |
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 299 | 18 | 6.0% |
| Nucleic Acids Research | 302 | 18 | 6.0% |
| BMC Bioinformatics | 270 | 16 | 5.9% |
| Nature Cell Biology | 172 | 10 | 5.8% |
| Journal of Virology | 297 | 16 | 5.4% |
| BMJ | 148 | 7 | 4.7% |
| Science Advances | 307 | 14 | 4.6% |
| Journal of Bacteriology | 198 | 9 | 4.5% |
| Gastroenterology | 179 | 8 | 4.5% |
| Blood | 296 | 13 | 4.4% |
| Brain | 302 | 13 | 4.3% |
| PLOS Medicine | 140 | 6 | 4.3% |
| Nature Medicine | 306 | 13 | 4.2% |
| Science | 286 | 12 | 4.2% |
| Molecular Biology and Evolution | 268 | 11 | 4.1% |
| The Lancet | 244 | 10 | 4.1% |
| Circulation | 253 | 10 | 4.0% |
| Bioinformatics | 172 | 6 | 3.5% |
| The Journal of Neuroscience | 300 | 10 | 3.3% |
| PLOS ONE | 300 | 9 | 3.0% |
| JAMA | 180 | 5 | 2.8% |
| Annals of Internal Medicine | 162 | 4 | 2.5% |
| New England Journal of Medicine | 298 | 7 | 2.3% |
| The Lancet Oncology | 158 | 2 | 1.3% |
| Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography | 83 | 1 | 1.2% |
| The Lancet Neurology | 78 | 0 | 0.0% |
All 54 journals shown. Most have ~150–300 papers sampled, so individual rates are meaningful; the few small-sample journals (the review titles, JASE, Lancet Neurology) should be read as directional. The corpus-level rate is the most reliable figure.
Real examples
Each of these is a 2025 paper in a major journal whose reference list includes a paper that has since been retracted. In several cases the retraction landed after the citing paper was written — the point is that a pre-submission check now catches it in seconds. Links go to the DOIs so you can verify both ends.
Method
- Sample: 12,402 recent (2025) journal-articles drawn across 54 major biomed journals via the Crossref
/worksAPI by ISSN, with reference lists of at least 10 resolvable DOIs (4,969 thinner candidates excluded). - Check: all 744,770 reference citations (435,108 unique cited DOIs) matched against the live Retraction Watch dataset (over 61,000 notices) and Crossref’s
update-to[]retraction notices — the identical code path behind the free checker. Severity precedence: retracted > expression of concern > correction. - Confidence intervals are Wilson 95%. Lower bound: the hijacked-journal clone-domain check was not run in this batch; production applies it too.
- Known biases (stated plainly): flag probability scales with reference-list length, so excluding thin-reference papers pushes the rate up; read 7.1% as the rate among papers with substantive bibliographies, not all 2025 papers. The 54-journal panel spans clinical medicine, oncology, cell and molecular biology, immunology, microbiology, genetics, neuroscience, and methods, but it is a sample of major journals, not a random draw of all biomedical literature; the per-field gradient above is the honest way to read it.
Data sources are credited on the Sentry about page; if you cite this study, please also cite the Retraction Watch Database (ISSN 2692-4579) and Crossref. Need the full row-level data (every citing/cited DOI pair)? Email erik@manusights.com.
Download the data
The per-journal table and study summary, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. Please credit Manusights, the Retraction Watch Database (ISSN 2692-4579), and Crossref.
How to cite this study
Manusights. (2026). How often do recent papers cite retracted research? A 12,402-paper study. https://manusights.com/tools/reference-integrity/retracted-citation-study
@misc{manusights2026retracted,
title = {How Often Do Recent Papers Cite Retracted Research? A 12,402-Paper Study},
author = {{Manusights}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://manusights.com/tools/reference-integrity/retracted-citation-study}},
note = {Data study. 12,402 recent biomedical papers across 54 journals; built on Crossref and the Retraction Watch Database (ISSN 2692-4579).}
}Embed this badge
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