UOC Anesthesia and Intensive Care Unit, Padua University Hospital, Padova, Italy
Department of Medicine, DIMED, Section of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2023 Jul;48(7):349-351. doi: 10.1136/rapm-2022-104177. Epub 2023 Jan 17.
Inappropriate citation of retracted literature is a common problem in the general medical literature. In 2020, more than 2300 articles were retracted, a dramatic increase from 38 in 2000. By exploring a contemporary series of retractions by one research group, we aimed to evaluate if citations of retracted articles is occurring in the area of regional anesthesiology.
Using the Scopus database, we examined the full text of all the articles citing research articles coauthored by an anesthesiologist who had multiple articles retracted in 2022. After excluding the research articles citing non-retracted articles authored by the above mentioned anesthesiologist, we included in our analysis all the articles containing a retracted citation and published after the retraction notice.
The search was performed on October 30, 2022, retrieving a total of 121 articles citing the researcher's work. Among the retrieved articles, 53 correctly cited non-retracted research and 37 were published before the retraction notice. Among the 31 remaining articles, 42 retracted research papers were cited. Twenty-five of the retracted articles were cited in the Discussion section of the manuscripts, 15 in the Introduction section, 1 in the Methods section (description of a technique), and one was cited in a review. No manuscript used the flawed data to calculate the sample size.
In this contemporary example from the regional anesthesia literature, we identified that citation of retracted work remains a common phenomenon.
在一般医学文献中，不恰当地引用已撤回文献是一个常见问题。2020 年，有超过 2300 篇文章被撤回，这一数字与 2000 年的 38 篇相比大幅增加。通过探索一个研究小组的当代系列撤回案例，我们旨在评估在区域麻醉学领域是否存在引用撤回文章的情况。
我们使用 Scopus 数据库，检查了所有引用一位麻醉学家合著的研究文章的全文，该麻醉学家在 2022 年有多项文章被撤回。在排除引用上述麻醉学家未撤回文章的研究文章后，我们将所有包含撤回引用且在撤回通知发布后的文章纳入分析。
搜索于 2022 年 10 月 30 日进行，共检索到 121 篇引用该研究人员工作的文章。在所检索的文章中，53 篇正确引用了未撤回的研究文章，37 篇发表在撤回通知之前。在其余 31 篇文章中，引用了 31 篇撤回的研究论文。在撤回的文章中，有 25 篇被引用在手稿的讨论部分，15 篇在引言部分，1 篇在方法部分（描述了一种技术），1 篇被引用在综述中。没有手稿使用有缺陷的数据来计算样本量。
在这个当代的区域麻醉学文献案例中，我们发现引用撤回的工作仍然是一个普遍现象。
