Dynamics of Cross-Platform Attention to Retracted Papers: Pervasiveness, Audience Skepticism, and Timing of Retractions

Retracted papers often circulate widely on social media, online news outlets and other websites before their official retraction. The spread of potentially inaccurate or misleading results from retracted papers can harm the scientific community and the public. Here we quantify the amount and type of attention 3,985 retracted papers received over time in different online platforms, ranging from social media to knowledge repositories. Comparing to a set of non-retracted control papers, we show that retracted papers receive more attention after publication. This tendency seems to be more pronounced on news outlets and knowledge repositories. This finding indicates that untrustworthy research penetrates even curated platforms and is often shared uncritically, amplifying the negative impact on the public. At the same time, we find that posts on Twitter tend to express more uncertainty about retracted than about control papers, suggesting that these posts could help identify potentially flawed scientific findings. We also find that, around the time they are retracted, papers generate discussions that are mostly about the retraction incident rather than about the results of the paper, showing that by this point papers have exhausted attention to their findings and highlighting the limited effect of retractions in reducing uncritical conversations. Our findings reveal the extent to which retracted papers are discussed on different online platforms and identify at scale audience skepticism towards them. They also show that retractions come too late, which has implications for efforts to better time retraction notices.