Characteristics of retracted research papers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Front Med (Lausanne). 2024 Jan 10:10:1288014. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1288014. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Objectives: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a large number of research papers were published, and some of them were retracted. The present study aims to reveal the characteristics of retracted papers before and during the pandemic.

Methods: The study investigated 24,542,394 publications from 1999 to 2022 and analyzed the profiles of retracted papers from the perspectives of year, disease category, country, and journal.

Results: Retraction rates were generally increasing at least until 2019, and were the highest for "Neoplasms." The number of publications for "Infections" and "Respiratory Tract Diseases" dramatically rose during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, the retraction rates in the two categories or of COVID-19-related papers were not especially high compared to other diseases. The association with retraction was strongest for China in most disease categories, whereas for COVID-19 papers, other countries showed higher retraction rates than China. In recent years, retracted papers have become less likely to be published in high-impact journals.

Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic does not seem to affect the retractions of research papers much. We should keep monitoring retractions and analyze the effects of pandemics for better science.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; publication; research integrity; retraction.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Strategic Center of Biomedical Advanced Vaccine Research and Development for Preparedness and Response (JP233fa627004) and the Japan Initiative for Global Research Network on Infectious Diseases (23wm0125011h0001) from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, and by the Nagasaki University State of the Art Research Program (grant number not available) from Nagasaki University. The funding sources had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.