PONE-D-22-16961Self-correction in science: The effect of retraction on the frequency of citationsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kühberger,

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• Please go through the comments made by the reviewers. The reviewers have suggested minor edits to be made. Once these are carried out, the manuscript could be considered for publication.

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Please go through the comments made by the reviewers. The reviewers have suggested minor edits to be made. Once these are carried out, the manuscript could be considered for publication.

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: In the manuscript entitled "Self-correction in science: The effect of retraction on the frequency of citations", the authors describe how retraction of papers affect their citation counts. The authors obtained and analyzed the citation data over 10 years, centered around the year of retraction, for both the retracted papers and their year matched control paper counterparts from the same respective journals. The authors found that retraction caused the papers to lose on average, 60% of their citations post retraction. This was in contrast to the non retracted papers which on average, gained 20% citations in the same period. The authors noted that the retracted papers despite having a higher average citation count than the control group before retraction, lost this advantage and ended up falling lower than the control group. The effect of retraction was consistent even when yearly citation trends were analyzed. The authors conclude that even though retractions cause a significant reduction in the citation counts, they do not completely eliminate citations for the retracted papers.

The merits of the study are its original findings, robust sample size, and easy readability. The topic has broad implications, especially in the post pandemic publication landscape which has brought phenomenon of retractions, a once largely academic issue, into the view of the public. The findings of this paper are consistent with existing literature. That said, there are some revisions that can be made to the paper to make it well rounded for publication.

1) The authors report that there is a strong (but not absolute) effect of retractions on citations. And also that "retraction of a paper presupposes it being perceived and probably read, to begin with. Only the important (i.e., well cited) papers have some potential to become the target of scientific investigation". Although this sounds logical, it is still speculative. Borrowing from Hill's criteria of causality, the paper would benefit from establishing a few more measures of association that could address these speculative comments. The paper does a good job of demonstrating temporality but not specificity or consistency of association. This could be done quite easily with the data the authors have. For instance, analyzing the papers which got retracted, say <=2 years vs >2 years from publication year (since median time to retraction is 2 years), could tell us if these sets of retracted papers differ in their degree of "specialness" with respect to being read/cited. Another subgroup analysis could be to look at the retracted papers before and after 2010 (since a big spike seems to appear around that time) to see if the loss of citations is consistent. These are only suggestions and it is up to the authors to perform the necessary subgroup analyses.

2) The paper shows an increase in the control group annual citations after the retraction year (figure 4). The authors have not explained why this should be expected. Is this the natural trend of citations which increase and then decrease to a plateau? If that is the case, why is there a bump specifically after the year of retraction?

3) The authors presumably analyzed the yearly citation trends of all the papers after the retraction year for both the retracted group and the control group. This could artificially magnify the effect being studied since every year before the retraction year would not have had the same number of papers as every year after. If this was not the case, it is not very clear from the paper. The authors should report the data on the number of papers they had analyzed each year before and after the retraction year. A simple table with this information along with the mean and SD data for each year (before and after retraction) will greatly improve the clarity of the paper.

4) The paper has minor grammatical errors that do not impact readability but nevertheless could be corrected.

Reviewer #2: Authoring high quality scientific articles is an integral endeavor of scientific research. On certain occasions though, for well documented reasons, some of these scientific articles are retracted. The authors of this manuscript provide compelling data driven evidence for continued citations of retracted papers within the scientific literature. Based on their observations, clearly there is a need for the scientific journals and research scientists to take note of citations of retracted papers and create a process to identify and avoid them in their own work.

Please find below a few questions/ suggestions that could further improve this manuscript:

1. Can actionable suggestions/ recommendations be provided for ensuring that retracted articles are not further highlighted via citations. Specifically, defining the role technology could play to combat the bad practices followed by certain subset of research investigators would be appreciated by the scientific community.

2. It could be interesting to analyze the observed results as a function of scientific domains. Do certain domains tend to propagate retracted articles for longer periods of time within scientific publications?

3. Provide appropriate and adequate references to methods mentioned such as hierarchical linear mixed-effects models. Not everyone is aware of these methods and it would help interpret the results better. Especially talk about the need to use this method since they capture fixed as well as random effects.

4. Inherent biases exist in retracted publications. Some of them get wide publicized due to their relevance to current topic of interest. This was briefly touched upon by the authors. Selection biases such as this do affect the observed results. A more detailed analysis or a plan to address them would benefit the reader.

5. A larger question that arises is what can be done to ensure that high quality standards are encouraged so that the percentage of retracted papers reduce with time? As a community we need to address this so that the citations of retracted papers would be restricted.

6. Last but not the least, it is not enough to point out that there is a crucial problem plaguing the scientific publications. There is a need to strongly identify the process to capture the retracted papers during the review process and bring it forward to the journal editor's attention before accepting the same for publication.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Self-correction in science: The effect of retraction on the frequency of citations

PONE-D-22-16961R1

Dear Dr. Kühberger,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Venkatesh Shankar Madhugiri

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The authors have addressed the comments made by the reviewers. The paper is now suitable for publication.

Reviewers' comments: