How often does a recently published biomedical paper cite research that has since been retracted, corrected, or placed under an expression of concern?
We checked 12,402 recent (2025) papers across 54 major biomedical journals, covering 744,770 individual citations (435,108 unique cited DOIs), against the Retraction Watch Database and Crossref retraction notices.
| Measure | Rate | Count | 95% CI (Wilson) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Papers citing a retracted, EoC, or corrected reference | 7.1% | 875 / 12,402 | 6.6 to 7.5% |
| Papers citing a retracted or EoC reference (higher severity) | 1.4% | 170 / 12,402 | 1.2 to 1.6% |
About 1 in 73 recent papers cites a retracted or expression-of-concern reference.
We lead with the 1.4% figure rather than the headline 7.1%, because "correction" is the lowest-severity flag and the most common one: 783 of the flagged references were corrections, against 162 retractions and 25 expressions of concern. An erratum is not misconduct.
The corpus average hides a sharp split. Cell and cancer biology run far above it; clinical medicine sits near the floor.
Full 54-journal table (click to expand)
| Journal | Sampled | Papers with flag | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nature Reviews Immunology | 42 | 9 | 21.4% |
| Nature Reviews Drug Discovery | 30 | 5 | 16.7% |
| Cancer Cell | 128 | 21 | 16.4% |
| Cell | 305 | 47 | 15.4% |
| Cell Reports | 306 | 45 | 14.7% |
| Cancer Research | 291 | 42 | 14.4% |
| Journal of Experimental Medicine | 158 | 20 | 12.7% |
| Diabetes | 182 | 23 | 12.6% |
| Immunity | 178 | 22 | 12.4% |
| American Journal of Human Genetics | 166 | 19 | 11.4% |
| Nature Immunology | 183 | 20 | 10.9% |
| Neuron | 232 | 25 | 10.8% |
| Molecular Cell | 274 | 27 | 9.9% |
| Developmental Cell | 205 | 20 | 9.8% |
| Science Translational Medicine | 255 | 24 | 9.4% |
| Nature Biotechnology | 163 | 15 | 9.2% |
| eLife | 289 | 26 | 9.0% |
| Nature Genetics | 264 | 22 | 8.3% |
| Nature | 294 | 24 | 8.2% |
| Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications | 297 | 24 | 8.1% |
| Journal of Immunology | 306 | 23 | 7.5% |
| Journal of Cell Biology | 209 | 15 | 7.2% |
| Nature Communications | 303 | 21 | 6.9% |
| Journal of Biological Chemistry | 306 | 21 | 6.9% |
| PLOS Genetics | 295 | 20 | 6.8% |
| Nature Neuroscience | 208 | 14 | 6.7% |
| PLOS Biology | 308 | 19 | 6.2% |
| Nature Methods | 227 | 14 | 6.2% |
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 299 | 18 | 6.0% |
| Nucleic Acids Research | 302 | 18 | 6.0% |
| BMC Bioinformatics | 270 | 16 | 5.9% |
| Nature Cell Biology | 172 | 10 | 5.8% |
| Journal of Virology | 297 | 16 | 5.4% |
| BMJ | 148 | 7 | 4.7% |
| Science Advances | 307 | 14 | 4.6% |
| Journal of Bacteriology | 198 | 9 | 4.5% |
| Gastroenterology | 179 | 8 | 4.5% |
| Blood | 296 | 13 | 4.4% |
| Brain | 302 | 13 | 4.3% |
| PLOS Medicine | 140 | 6 | 4.3% |
| Nature Medicine | 306 | 13 | 4.2% |
| Science | 286 | 12 | 4.2% |
| Molecular Biology and Evolution | 268 | 11 | 4.1% |
| The Lancet | 244 | 10 | 4.1% |
| Circulation | 253 | 10 | 4.0% |
| Bioinformatics | 172 | 6 | 3.5% |
| The Journal of Neuroscience | 300 | 10 | 3.3% |
| PLOS ONE | 300 | 9 | 3.0% |
| JAMA | 180 | 5 | 2.8% |
| Annals of Internal Medicine | 162 | 4 | 2.5% |
| New England Journal of Medicine | 298 | 7 | 2.3% |
| The Lancet Oncology | 158 | 2 | 1.3% |
| Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography | 83 | 1 | 1.2% |
| The Lancet Neurology | 78 | 0 | 0.0% |
Machine-readable copies in data/. The 54 rows sum to 12,402 papers sampled and 875 flagged.
If you work in cell biology, oncology, or immunology, your bibliography's base rate is roughly five times a clinical journal's.
A paper is not wrong because one of its references was later retracted. Retractions frequently land after the citing paper was written, and the citing authors usually had no way to know.
The narrower and more useful point: at submission time, nobody ran a check that would have caught it, and that check now takes seconds.
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
data/retracted-citation-rate-by-journal-2026-06-04.csv |
Per-journal table: journal, papers sampled, papers with a flag, flag rate. Methodology in the header comments. |
data/retracted-citation-rate-by-journal-2026-06-04.json |
Same data plus corpus-level summary and study metadata. |
Row-level data (every citing/cited DOI pair) is available on request: erik@manusights.com
Full detail in METHODOLOGY.md.
- Sample: 12,402 recent (2025) journal-articles drawn across 54 major biomedical journals via the Crossref
/worksAPI by ISSN, restricted to papers with at least 10 resolvable reference DOIs (4,969 thinner candidates excluded). - Check: all 744,770 reference citations matched against the live Retraction Watch dataset (over 61,000 notices) and Crossref
update-to[]retraction notices. - Severity precedence: retracted > expression of concern > correction.
- Intervals: Wilson 95%.
- This is a conservative lower bound. The hijacked-journal clone-domain check was not run in this batch, though production applies it.
- Flag probability scales with reference-list length. Excluding thin-reference papers pushes the rate up. Read 7.1% as the rate among papers with substantive bibliographies, not among all 2025 papers.
- The 54-journal panel is a sample of major journals, not a random draw of all biomedical literature. The per-field gradient is the honest way to read it.
- Review articles score high partly because they cite more. The figures are unadjusted for reference count.
Manusights. (2026). How often do recent papers cite retracted research? A 12,402-paper study. https://manusights.com/tools/reference-integrity/retracted-citation-study
@misc{manusights2026retracted,
title = {How Often Do Recent Papers Cite Retracted Research? A 12,402-Paper Study},
author = {{Manusights}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://manusights.com/tools/reference-integrity/retracted-citation-study}},
note = {Data study. 12,402 recent biomedical papers across 54 journals;
built on Crossref and the Retraction Watch Database (ISSN 2692-4579).}
}If you cite this study, please also cite the underlying sources: the Retraction Watch Database (ISSN 2692-4579) and Crossref. Neither is ours; the analysis is.
CC BY 4.0. Reuse freely with attribution to Manusights, the Retraction Watch Database, and Crossref.
- Study page with the full interactive table: https://manusights.com/tools/reference-integrity/retracted-citation-study
- Free reference-integrity checker (paste a bibliography, no account): https://manusights.com/tools/reference-integrity
- Citation metadata for the Manusights service itself: https://github.com/Manusights/manusights-citation