Citing Retracted Papers Affects Education and Librarianship, so Distorted Academic Metrics Need a Correction.

A recent paper published in JLSC (Bakker & Riegelman, 2018) noted that in mental health scholarship, the retracted status of 40% of 812 records for 144 retracted papers-including as much as 26.3% of published PDFs-was not clearly indicated as such. Even with a visual indication of the retracted status of a paper, which limits the necessary information available to the public and readership indicating that such literature should no longer be used or cited, retracted literature continues to be cited. In this commentary, we reflect on additional reasons for the continued citation of retracted papers and explain how they might affect bibliometrics and scientometrics, and thus librarianship and education. Moreover, we propose actions to help scholars avoid citing retracted papers and to efficiently correct records where retracted papers have been cited. We introduce a prototype concept, the corrected journal impact factor (cJIF), to improve the accuracy of the most widespread journal-based metric, the Clarivate Analytics journal impact factor (JIF), which may have become distorted by the citation of retracted papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]