Redacted Dataset for Analyzing the Consistency of Retraction Indexing

This project investigates retraction indexing agreement among data sources: BCI, BIOABS, CCC, Compendex, Crossref, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PubMed, Retraction Watch, Scopus, and Web of Science Core. Post-retraction citation may be partly due to authors’ and publishers' challenges in systematically identifying retracted publications. To investigate 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 85,392 unique items. We also discuss common errors in indexing retracted publications. Our results reveal low retraction indexing agreement scores, indicating that databases widely disagree on indexing retracted publications they cover, leading to a lack of consistency in what publications are identified as retracted. Our findings highlight the need for clear and standard practices in the curation and management of retracted publications.

Pipeline code to get the result files can be found in the GitHub repository
https://github.com/infoqualitylab/retraction-indexing-agreement in the ‘src’ file containing iPython notebooks:

The ‘unionlist_completed-ria_2024-07-09.csv’ file has been redacted to remove proprietary data, as noted below in README.txt. Among our sources, data is openly available only for Crossref, PubMed, and Retraction Watch.

FILE FORMATS:
1) unionlist_completed-ria_2024-07-09.csv - UTF-8 CSV file
2) README.txt - text file