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Author(s)

Susan Lu

Ginger Jin

Brian Uzzi

Benjamin F. Jones

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 authors 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.
Date Published: 2013
Citations: Lu, Susan, Ginger Jin, Brian Uzzi, Benjamin F. Jones. 2013. The Retraction Penalty: Evidence from the Web of Science. Nature Scientific Reports. (3146)DOI: 10.1038/srep03146.