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Scientific retractions occur for a multitude of reasons. A growing body of research has studied the phenomenon of retraction through systematic analyses of the characteristics of retracted articles and their associated citations. In our study, we focus on the characteristics of articles that cite retracted articles, and the changes in citation dynamics pre‐ and post‐retraction. We leverage descriptive statistics and ego‐network methods to examine 4,871 retracted articles and their citations before and after retraction. Our retracted articles data was obtained from PubMed, Scopus, and Retraction Watch and their citing articles from Scopus. Our findings indicate a stark decrease in post‐retraction citations and that most of these citations came from countries different from the retracted article's country of publication. Citation context analyses of a subset of retracted articles also reveal that post‐retraction citations came from articles with disciplinary and geographical boundaries different from that of the retracted article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retraction removes seriously flawed papers from the scientific literature. However, even papers retracted for scientific fraud continue to be cited and used as valid after their retraction. Retracted papers are inadequately identified on publisher pages and in scholarly databases, and scholars' personal libraries frequently contain retracted papers. To address this, we are developing a tool called ReTracker (https://github.com/nikolausn/ReTrackers) that automatically checks a user's Zotero library for retracted articles, and adds retraction status as a new metadata field directly in the library. In this paper, we present the current version of ReTracker, which automatically flags retracted articles from PubMed. We describe how we have iteratively improved ReTracker's matching performance through its initial two versions. Our tests show that the current version of ReTracker is able to flag retracted articles from PubMed with high precision and recall, and to distinguish retracted articles from articles about retraction. In its current state, ReTracker can actively and automatically bring retraction metadata into Zotero, and in future work we will test its usability with scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]