A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact

TL;DR

This study quantitatively examines how publication retractions affect the scholarly impact of papers, authors, and institutions, revealing significant decreases in impact post-retraction and limited influence on the wider academic community.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of retraction effects across multiple dimensions and introduces empirical evidence on the localized nature of retraction impact.

Findings

Retracted papers and authors experience significant impact decline after retraction.

Impact decrease is most severe when retractions are due to scientific misconduct.

The retraction penalty does not significantly spread through the scholarly social network.

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the rate of publication retractions has increased dramatically in academia. In this study, we investigate retractions from a quantitative perspective, aiming to answer two fundamental questions. One, how do retractions influence the scholarly impact of retracted papers, authors, and institutions? Two, does this influence propagate to the wider academic community through scholarly associations? Specifically, we analyzed a set of retracted articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS), and ran multiple experiments to compare changes in scholarly impact against a control set of non-retracted articles, authors, and institutions. We further applied the Granger Causality test to investigate whether different scientific topics are dynamically affected by retracted papers occurring within those topics. Our results show two key findings: first, the scholarly impact of retracted papers and authors significantly decreases after retraction, and the most severe impact decrease correlates to retractions based on proven purposeful scientific misconduct; second, this retraction penalty does not seem to spread through the broader scholarly social graph, but instead has a limited and localized effect. Our findings may provide useful insights for scholars or science committees to evaluate the scholarly value of papers, authors, or institutions related to retractions.