You're Probably Citing a Retracted Paper Right Now
Here's How to Find Out
A researcher working on a systematic review spends two months gathering sources. She has checked that every paper exists, confirmed the DOIs resolve, and formatted the citations correctly. What she has not checked is whether any of those papers was retracted after she added it to her reference list. Three of them were. She finds out when the reviewer flags them.
This is not a rare scenario. In Nature and Science, post-retraction citations account for 47.7 percent and 40.9 percent of those retracted papers total citations respectively [1]. Nearly half of all citations to retracted papers in the world most visible journals happen after the retraction notice was published. Researchers are citing work that has been formally corrected out of the record, often without knowing.
Why Retracted Papers Keep Accumulating Citations
The volume of retracted work is growing. 2023 set a historical record with over 14,000 retraction notices issued globally [2]. Within the Web of Science Core Collection, retracted content represents just 0.04 percent of indexed articles [2]. But the papers in that fraction often attracted disproportionate attention precisely because they were once significant enough to be cited widely before their retraction.
The problem is a lag problem. A paper gets retracted. The retraction notice goes into the database. But the original paper stays where it has always been: searchable, readable, and accessible via the same DOI it always had. Researchers who added it to their reference manager before the retraction, and have not revisited their library since, do not know. Their citation persists in the next paper, and the one after that.
The Consequences of Citing Retracted Work
The consequences arrive in stages, and they escalate.
At the submission stage, a reviewer familiar with the retracted paper will flag it. This is an increasingly common experience as awareness of specific retractions has grown in most specialties. The paper comes back requiring the authors to address the citation, which may mean removing the claim it supported or finding a valid replacement source.
At the publication stage, the consequences are more serious. A paper that cites retracted work contributes to citation contamination: the spread of discredited findings through a chain of subsequent publications, each of which builds on the previous one without knowing the foundational source has been removed. Readers who follow that chain backwards rarely reach the retraction notice first [1].
From 2025, Clarivate excluded citations to and from retracted articles from Journal Impact Factor calculations [2]. The policy change acknowledges the problem directly: retracted citations distort the scholarly record, and removing their influence from impact metrics is one institutional response to a problem that has not been solved at the point of submission.
What This Means for Editors, Reviewers, and Lecturers
For peer reviewers, spotting a citation to a retracted paper is a professional judgment call. Flagging it is correct, but the reviewer also has to decide whether the retracted work was central to the paper argument or peripheral. A paper that builds its entire framework on a retracted source needs substantive revision. One that cites a retracted paper for a secondary claim may need only a citation replacement.
For editors, a manuscript that cites several retracted papers raises a question about how thoroughly the authors verified their sources. It is not proof of misconduct. But it is evidence of incomplete due diligence, and it adds to the case for returning the manuscript before review.
For lecturers supervising postgraduate research, the emergence of publicly available retraction tracking tools makes citation verification practical in a way it was not five years ago. The Retraction Watch database is accessible without a subscription. Teaching students to cross-check their reference lists against known retractions before submission is a practical skill that is increasingly expected by editors and reviewers alike.
Checking Your Reference List Against the Retraction Record
Retraction checking used to require specialist knowledge and significant manual effort. The Retraction Watch database, now integrated into several publishing workflows and supported by Clarivate Web of Science flagging, makes it possible to check a reference list against known retractions systematically.
The check is straightforward: run your reference list DOIs against the retraction database before you submit. Any match comes back flagged. You can then decide whether the citation is peripheral enough to keep with a correction note, or central enough that removing it requires revising the argument.
CiteOrbit checks reference existence and, where retraction data is available, flags citations to retracted work. The check happens on the reference list, not the manuscript. Nothing about your unpublished research is exposed. Just a DOI goes out. Just a match comes back.
References
[1] Hu X, Acuto O, et al. Why do some retracted articles continue to get cited? Scientometrics [Internet]. 2024 [cited 2026 Jul 27]. Available from: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-05147-4
[2] Quaderi N. Journal Citation Reports 2025: Addressing retractions and strengthening research integrity [Internet]. Clarivate. 2025 [cited 2026 Jul 27]. Available from: https://clarivate.com/academia-