It is not rare that an unfortunate biology paper has to be retracted. Such is the case for a 2011 Journal of Neuroscience paper (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21900561) which was retracted in 2012.
But I find it extremely disturbing that it continues to be cited for another 14 times (> 2 folds of the journal's IF) since 2013-2015, by peer-review journals & book. I checked some of the research articles, and none of them highlight the retraction status of this paper. Journals including Pain, Molecular pain, Encyclopedia of Pain from Springer.
DO NOT KNOW HOW & WHY! Not sure if it will gain citations in the coming 2016.
It makes me angry also. Why they do not even bother to check if the research they cite is valid or not?
I fully agree, but is not only the fault of the authors. The editors should perform checks on the literature quoted in a manuscript.
I also agree. It is also the responsibility of the reviewers to check for retracted literature, since they are supposedly expert enought to provide peer review. I can see that a paper published in 2013 might miss the retraction, depending on what stage of review it was in when the retraction occured. But after that--no excuse. Unless, of course, they are citing it because it had been retracted (I am not in the pain field).
Books sometimes have a very long lead time, so it will be interesting to see what happens with the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Pain.
Thank you for caring about scientific integrity.
Jill
Thank you for the ecouragements. I started a little research on this dark side of citations and probably I was a little overreacted at the beginning.
A report on Nature 2011 alerted "withdrawn papers live on" back to decades ago (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111005/full/478026a.html), but hardly believable, this ill-formed practice still continues in these digital days.
It is hard to believe anyone can easily ignore the warnings from pulishers and databases like Pubmed. But it is a lot easier & reasonable to not aware of this, if you only retrieve references from abstracts in Endnote. Another possibility is, one is too keen to download the PDF file of the initial version and never bothers to check back.
Back to this retracted article which I refer, it is the results have been cited, for example, in a review on serotonin & pain control http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23500207. While this does not necessary affect the overrall validity of the article citing the withdrawn papers, but it is still insidious harm. I will just take more care of the papers I read.
Dear Jiahao,
I also agree with your observations on the use of EndNote, and all of us probably have old papers stored in our files (non-PDF) or on our computer hard drives (PDF). So, all working scientists should always take more care of the papers they read, and check for updates when writing up their own work. It was, and always should be, part of the scientific process. That is how I was trained, so you are not over-reacting to the "dark side". Thankfully, it's easier now in the digital age to do this, at least with PubMed and the Journal websites, and groups such as Retraction Watch. In the pre-digital age, although I think there was less literature to survey, it was more work to find the retraction in the print version.
Now if there was only an easier way to track the junk and predatory journals!
Regards,
Jill
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