Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Jun 14;10(12):e33007.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e33007. eCollection 2024 Jun 30.

Recent trends: Retractions of articles in the oncology field

Quan Qi  1   2   3 , Jiaqun Huang  1   2   3 , Yinhang Wu  1   2   3 , Yuefen Pan  1   2   3 , Jing Zhuang  1   2   3 , Xi Yang  1   2   3
Affiliations

Recent trends: Retractions of articles in the oncology field

Quan Qi et al. Heliyon. .

Abstract

Background: In recent years, there has been a surge in media reports on articles being retracted after publication. This issue has gained significant attention, particularly due to the consecutive large-scale retractions carried out by renowned international publishers, which have aroused widespread concern in the society.

Objective: To analyze the data of retracted articles and retraction trends.

Methods: The publications were searched through Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database and imported into CiteSpace in plain text format, and visual analysis of countries, institutions, keywords, and subject areas were performed to reveal the trends of retracted articles and the worst areas of retraction.

Results: From 1990 to 2022, 21,568 retracted articles were retrieved, among which the number of retracted articles increased year by year. China is the country with the highest number of retracted articles; Islamic Azad University is the institution with the highest number of retracted articles. In the analysis of all retracted articles across different subject areas, the number of retracted articles in the field of oncology was the highest; In the keyword cluster analysis of retracted articles within the field of oncology, the most prominent category of retracted articles were related to pancreatic cancer.

Conclusions: Scientific and systematic analysis of retracted articles is conducive to improving the quality of papers, raising the level of human research, and cleaning up the research environment.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; CiteSpace; Retracted articles.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flowchart of literature screening.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Number of retracted articles over the years. The main graph shows the change of the number of retracted articles over the years for all fields, and the thumbnail shows the change of the number of retracted articles over the years for the oncology subject area.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Diagram of the collaborative network of country/regional (A) Analysis of all retracted articles; (B) Analysis of retracted articles in oncology. Nodes represent country lines connecting them. The number of publications is proportional to the size of the nodes. Connections between nodes stand for partnerships. The color changes from purple to yellow from 1990 to 2022.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The retraction rate of articles per 10,000 published articles in China, the United States, and India (2013–2022).
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Diagram of the collaborative network of institutional (A) Analysis of all retracted articles; (B) Analysis of retracted articles in oncology. Nodes represent institutions and lines connect them. The number of publications is proportional to the size of the nodes. Connections between nodes mark partnerships.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Subject areas and keywords visualization (A) Analysis of subject areas of all retracted articles; (B) Keyword clustering view of all retracted articles; (C) Keyword clustering view of tumor subject areas. Different colors represent different clusters. Each node represents a keyword and the number on the node is the cluster to which the keyword belongs. Labels are assigned to clusters. The smaller the count is, the more keywords are in the cluster.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Amos K.A. The ethics of scholarly publishing: exploring differences in plagiarism and duplicate publication across nations. J. Med. Libr. Assoc. 2014;102(2):87–91. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cokol M., Ozbay F., Rodriguez-Esteban R. Retraction rates are on the rise. EMBO Rep. 2008;9(1):2. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Van Noorden R. More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 - a new record. Nature. 2023;624(7992):479–481. - PubMed
    1. Pantziarka P., Meheus L. Journal retractions in oncology: a bibliometric study. Future Oncol. 2019;15(31):3597–3608. - PubMed
    1. Wager E., Barbour V., Yentis S., Kleinert S. Retractions: guidance from the Committee on publication ethics (COPE) Croat. Med. J. 2009;50(6):532–535. - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources