A qualitative and quantitative analysis of open citations to retracted articles: the Wakefield et al.'s case

TL;DR

This study analyzes open citations to Wakefield et al.'s retracted paper, revealing increasing citations over 20 years, early discussions of retraction, and domain-specific differences in acknowledgment of the retraction.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive methodology for analyzing open citations to retracted articles, including data collection, topic extraction, and visualization, with a focus on reproducibility.

Findings

Citations to Wakefield et al.'s paper increased over 20 years.

Discussions of retraction appeared before official retraction in 2010.

Social sciences cited and discussed retraction more than medical fields.

Abstract

In this article, we show the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of open citations on a popular and highly cited retracted paper: "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" by Wakefield et al., published in 1998. The main purpose of our study is to understand the behavior of the publications citing retracted articles and the characteristics of the citations the retracted articles accumulated over time. Our analysis is based on a methodology which illustrates how we gathered the data, extracted the topics of the citing articles, and visualized the results. The data and services used are all open and free to foster the reproducibility of the analysis. The outcomes concerned the analysis of the entities citing Wakefield et al.'s article and their related in-text citations. We observed a constant increasing number of citations in the last 20 years, accompanied with a constant increment in the percentage of those acknowledging its retraction. Citing articles have started either discussing or dealing with the retraction of Wakefield et al.'s article even before its full retraction, happened in 2010. Articles in the social sciences domain citing the Wakefield et al.'s one were among those that have mostly discussed its retraction. In addition, when observing the in-text citations, we noticed that a large part of the citations received by Wakefield et al.'s article has focused on general discussions without recalling strictly medical details, especially after the full retraction. Medical studies did not hesitate in acknowledging the retraction and often provided strong negative statements on it.