Citing documents of Wakefield’s retracted article: the domino effect of authors and journals

Jacqueline Leta (), Kizi Araujo () and Stephanie Treiber ()
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Jacqueline Leta: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Kizi Araujo: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Instituto de Comunicação e Informação Científica e Tecnológica em Saúde
Stephanie Treiber: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Scientometrics, 2022, vol. 127, issue 12, No 27, 7333-7349

Abstract: Abstract The present study aims to find out the origin of authors and the main sources in which citing documents of Wakefield’s 1998 retracted article are published in order to understand whether they act as promoters of a negative domino effect, there is, keeping alive a retracted article due to fraudulent data and analysis on the relationship between MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. The metadata of the 1577 citing documents of Wakefield’s article were downloaded from Scopus in three files according to the year of publication: 1998–2004 (partial retraction), 2005–2010 (in between partial and full retraction) and 2011–2020 (post full retraction). The number of citing documents in each period is 329, 411 and 837, respectively. A comparison between first and last periods indicates an impressive growth of language, authors, countries as well as journals from broader field coverage. Also, recent citing articles are highly cited and, even in a negative context, they contribute to the diffusion of a fraudulent article in the science context. The findings reinforce the urgency to create internal strategies in the scientific communication process, mainly inside the editorial flow, in order to reduce the dissemination of a retracted article that, in this case, is still harmful to society. At the end, the creation of an automatic mechanism to detect retracted articles included in the reference list of accepted articles is suggested.

Keywords: Retracted article; Misconduct; Scientific communication process; Domino effect; Grimpact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04353-2

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