Faculty BiographiesKellogg School of Management
AcademicsFacultyResearchKellogg Homepage
Home Page

Index
Search
Internal Site
Northwestern University
Ben Jones

Ben Jones

Associate Professor

Management & Strategy

Ph.D., MIT, 2003
M.Phil., Oxford University, 1997
BSE, Princeton University, 1995

 
 

The Retraction Penalty: Evidence from the Web of Science
with Susan Feng Lu, Ginger Jin, and Brian Uzzi
Nature Scientific Reports, November 2013

Abstract: Scientific articles are retracted at increasing rates, with the highest rates among top journals.  Here we show that a single retraction triggers citation losses through an author’s prior body of work. Compared to closely-matched control papers, citations fall by an average of 6.9% per year for each prior publication. These chain reactions are sustained on authors’ papers (a) published up to a decade earlier and (b) connected within the authors’ own citation network by up to 4 degrees of separation from the retracted publication. Importantly, however, citation losses among prior work disappear when authors self-report the error.  Our analyses and results span the range of scientific disciplines.

Paper (.pdf)

Supplementary Information

 

   

 

 

 

   
©2001 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University