Our three sources of data for retractions are RetractionWatch.com, CrossRef's Crossmark service and PubMed's data. Together these account for over 50,000 retractions with the Third Iron data set!
Users who click through to view a retracted article from one of our services (or who directly look one up in LibKey.io) will see an alternate version of our LibKey Format Chooser landing page noting the retraction and providing some additional details:
Depending on the article and the source of our retraction data you can expect to see one or more of the following additional elements on a retracted article:
Official Retraction Notice(s) - Link(s) to the publisher where you can see the publisher's statement about the article being retracted and any additional information they have provided.
Retraction Watch Related Article(s) - For retractions coming from Retraction Watch we may have links to articles on the RetractionWatch.com website where additional context is provided about this particular retraction or authors/publications/publishers related to it.
Reason for Retraction from Retraction Watch - For retractions coming from Retraction Watch we provide the specific reasons noted by the Retraction Watch team why an article was retracted. Not all retractions are "bad" — some are data mistakes brought by the authors requesting a publisher to retract their article so that others do not utilize the paper in their own work when it is faulty. Others however note fraudulent data, fake peer review, plagiarism and more!
Retractions coming from Crossmark or PubMed will not show the data specific to Retraction Watch but will still highlight the retraction and link to the publisher's retraction notice.
Retractions appear throughout the BrowZine and LibKey ecosystem in various ways, bringing to light at the linking stage of a user's journey when an article that may be of interest has been retracted and why.
Second Order Retractions
This type of indicator refers to references within an article that themselves have been retracted. Thus, the work(s) being cited for the paper that the user is currently looking at has a retraction status. This does not necessarily mean that the primary paper should be retracted or that there is anything at all wrong with it. Papers can of course be cited for very ancillary reasons where the work in question had no direct bearing on the outcomes of the primary paper. On the other hand, there are certainly situations where seminal works have been written which then cascaded into years or decades of additional science based on that work. Retraction Watch has an excellent table illustrating some of the top papers that have been retracted in terms of the number of citations they have (and many of those were cited even AFTER they were retracted!) As you can see, a single paper can lead to thousands of citations no doubt influencing at least some of those papers to come after it.
While we have identified over 50,000 primary retractions there are well over 500,000 Second Order Retractions and counting that have been identified and that are part of the Third Iron ecosystem!
Third Iron brings to the user's attention these Second Order Retractions within the LibKey Format Chooser. While the presence of a second order retraction is not "signposted" (i.e. the LibKey services simply say "Download PDF" rather than "Second Order Retraction") if a user DOES see these we direct them a LibKey Format Chooser which includes the notices as seen below:
This lack of signposting is done on purpose since, as mentioned above, there are MANY reasons why a paper that is retracted may be cited and it is not indicative on its own of the primary paper being affected in any way. However, we create the pathways of alert for the user to analyze the citation in question, link to its Format Chooser page within LibKey so they can review the retracted paper and decide if this in some way would influence their interest in citing the primary paper in their own work.