Network Visualization of a Retracted Article: Repeated Proliferation of Error through Citation Networks

Authors

Rosy Jan, University of Kashmir, IndiaFollow
Kirat Nazir, University of Kashmir, India
Kushboo Rani, University of Kashmir, India
Irtiza Peer, University of Kashmir, India
Waseem Farooq, University of Kashmir, India

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Retraction is used as an optimum tool to uphold and safe-guide the integrity of scholarly literature. However, knowingly or unknowingly the authors build the work on these false claims by citing the retracted articles. Such dependencies on retracted articles may become implicit and indirect causing profound and long-lasting threat to the credibility of the literature. Consequently, it is important to detect and analyze such threats. The article aims to demonstrate dependency of citing articles on retracted article with reference to the rest of the literature. A case study of highly cited (as reported by retraction watch) retracted article ”Spontaneous human adult stem cell transformation” published in Cancer Research in 2005 by Rubio, D as lead author is visualized in terms of bibliographic coupling of citing journals and network and density visualizations of co-citations of authors. The study concludes that there is high-order citation dependency of scientific literature on retracted article.