Hungarian researchers analyzed 35,514 articles retracted between 2001 and 2024, finding that most of them had a negligible scientific impact. According to the study, nine out of 10 of these papers—withdrawn after publication due to errors or evidence of misconduct—were very rarely cited in other articles. Of the total, 35% did not receive a single citation. Only a small fraction were cited more than 100 times. The author with the highest number of retractions in the period (112 in total) received an average of 11 citations per retracted paper, while the second on the list, with 86 retractions, averaged 28 citations.
The tenth author on the list, with 39 retracted articles, left a greater mark on the scientific literature. His retracted papers were cited an average of 158 times. The study did not reveal the identities of the authors. “At first glance, this might suggest a ‘healthy’ academic system where flawed work is swiftly identified and marginalized,” wrote the authors, economist Péter Sasvári of the Ludovika University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary, and PhD candidate Gergely Ferenc Lendvai, in a paper published in the Journal of Information Science. “However, it also masks the fact that a small number of high-citation retracted works continue to distort the landscape.” China led the way in numbers of retracted articles, followed by India and the USA. The analysis was based on data from the Scopus database of scientific journals.
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