Retracted Citations and Self-citations in Retracted Publications: A Comparative Study of Plagiarism and Fake Peer Review
Kiran Sharmaa, Parul Khurana
TL;DR
This study investigates how retracted citations behave across two defined categories—plagiarism and fake peer review—using Scopus data linked to Retraction Watch to quantify trends, retraction timing, and the distribution of retracted and self-citations. It reveals that plagiarism, while yielding more overall citations, experiences slower detection than fake peer review, which shows rapid identification and retraction after publication. Retracted citations are predominantly non-retracted overall, but a notable portion of retractions remains linked to the original misconduct category, with self-citations forming a small but non-negligible share that is disproportionately directed toward plagiarized work as collaboration size increases. The findings highlight the need for stronger retraction signaling and improved practices to inform researchers about the current status of cited works to preserve literature integrity.
Abstract
Retracted citations remain a significant concern in academia as they perpetuate misinformation and compromise the integrity of scientific literature despite their invalidation. To analyze the impact of retracted citations, we focused on two retraction categories: plagiarism and fake peer review. The data set was sourced from Scopus and the reasons for the retraction were mapped using the Retraction Watch database. The retraction trend shows a steady average growth in plagiarism cases of 1.2 times, while the fake peer review exhibits a fluctuating pattern with an average growth of 5.5 times. Although fewer papers are retracted in the plagiarism category compared to fake peer reviews, plagiarism-related papers receive 2.5 times more citations. Furthermore, the total number of retracted citations for plagiarized papers is 1.8 times higher than that for fake peer review papers. Within the plagiarism category, 46% of the retracted citations are due to plagiarism, while 53.6% of the retracted citations in the fake peer review category are attributed to the fake peer review. The results also suggest that fake peer review cases are identified and retracted more rapidly than plagiarism cases. Finally, self-citations constitute a small percentage of citations to retracted papers but are notably higher among citations that are later retracted in both the categories.