Abstract
<p>Post-retraction citation may be partly due to authors’ and publishers’ challenges in systematically identifying retracted publications. Previous research has repeatedly highlighted inconsistencies in the metadata and display of retracted publications. Yet limited work has investigated the indexing of retracted papers. To assess retraction indexing quality, we investigate the agreement in indexing retracted publications between 11 database sources, restricting to their coverage, resulting in a union list of 83,317 unique items. We also discuss common errors in indexing retracted publications. A researcher might assume that, if a database has some mechanism to identify retracted publications, then the database will correctly identify what is retracted. This is not the case: there is inconsistency in which publications are identified as retracted, across the 11 database sources we queried. Our results reveal low retraction indexing agreement scores, indicating that databases widely disagree about which publications within their coverage are retracted. Our findings highlight the need for increased adherence to standard retraction metadata practices and, where possible, increased open sharing of retracted publication metadata, in order to reduce inadvertent post-retraction citation.</p>