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. 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 When the cited work has been retracted for data manipulation or unreliable results, a citation that still leans on its original finding is a real problem a reviewer can flag.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 about 150 to 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. This is 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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