When was wakefields article retracted

A total of articles were identified, with 58 citing works excluded because they were non—English-language publications or the citation to the study by Wakefield et al could not be located by reviewers.

Citing works consisted of books, research articles, letters, editorials, news items, and other scholarly literature. Citations to the article by Wakefield et al were identified and analyzed by 2 reviewers in a blinded screening. Reviewers assigned a characteristic to each citation and indicated whether the retraction was documented. Main Outcomes and Measures The characteristics of citations to the article by Wakefield et al, were categorized as negative, affirmative, or contrastive; if not, persuasive; and if not, assumptive, perfunctory, methodologic, or conceptual.

Whether the partial retraction or notice of retraction was included in the citing work was also documented. Results Among the citing works included in this analysis, the most common citation characteristics were negative [ A total of of citing works Conclusions and Relevance Since the article by Wakefield et al was initially published, authors have mostly negated the findings of the study.

A significant number of authors did not document retractions of the article by Wakefield et al. The findings suggest that improvements are needed from publishers, bibliographic databases, and citation management software to ensure that retracted articles are accurately documented.

In an era of information overload, it can be challenging to find influential articles in any given field, and one method of identifying such influential articles is to look at citation counts. Retracted articles continue to be cited frequently without listing the retraction, 9 , 10 perhaps because there are no clear guidelines on whom is responsible for ensuring that retracted articles are properly cited as being retracted.

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine how authors of scholarly literature cited the article by Wakefield et al 16 that purported to show an association between the measles-mumps-rubella MMR vaccine and autism. The article was retracted in 2 stages: in , 10 of the original 12 authors issued a partial retraction of the interpretation that there is a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism 1 of the original authors was unable to be contacted and Wakefield was not an author included in this partial retraction , 17 and in , editors of The Lancet published a notice of retraction of the article because of false claims made in the original article.

In , of the 58 million references in Web of Science, only 14 works 0. According to the Web of Science Core Collection, in April , the article by Wakefield et al 16 was the ninth most-cited reference indexed with the topic of autism of more than 57 references and the second most-cited reference indexed with the topic of measles vaccines of more than references. The present study was not the first citation analysis of the article by Wakefield et al. The present study is novel because it is the first time, to our knowledge, that each citation to the article by Wakefield et al 16 was analyzed to see how the author cited the article, specifically assessing whether the author affirmed or negated the study by Wakefield et al.

This study replicated the methods used by Leung et al 21 in their article, Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction. Terms such as reference and citation are sometimes used interchangeably; thus, a glossary of terms is given in Table 1.

In this cross-sectional study, we E. We identified citations to the article by Wakefield et al 16 as of March 11, Fifty-eight articles were excluded from the citation analysis because the works were not written in English or the citation to the article by Wakefield et al 16 could not be located by the reviewers.

A total of citing works were included in the citation analysis. Bibliographic information and the full-text copy of each citing work was uploaded into Covidence systematic review software Veritas Health Innovation.

Covidence is a web-based software platform that is used to manage the screening process and extract data for systematic reviews; it allows blinded screening and custom tagging of records. Citing works were reviewed to determine the characteristic of the citation using an established taxonomy 5 , 21 Table 2.

Each citing work underwent a blinded screening by 2 of us E. Disagreement about the characteristics were brought before the group E. If citations fit into more than 1 category or the article by Wakefield et al 16 was cited more than once, a stepwise approach was used to assign the category. If a citation could not be located, the citing work was excluded from the review.

For multiple citation occurrences, the citation was categorized as contrastive if any of the citations had this characteristic. Barring this, a citation was categorized as overall negative or affirmative if any of the occurrences had these characteristics.

Finally, if citations did not meet any of these criteria, the citing works were brought before the group for consensus. Every citing work in the sample was assigned one characteristic. Not only were the citing works screened to determine the characteristic of each citation, they also were examined to determine whether the retracted status of the article by Wakefield et al 16 was identified in the citation or in the reference list.

A citing work was labeled as retraction referenced if the author specifically used the word retracted , retract , or retraction. Bibliographic information, characteristics, and retraction information were exported from Covidence as a CSV file, and Excel Microsoft Corp was used to analyze the data.

A descriptive analysis of the data was performed with a focus on frequencies and percentages. The sample consisted of all the included citing works retrieved from the Web of Science search apart from the 58 excluded articles.

Of the citing works, The other characteristics conceptual, contrastive, methodologic, and persuasive had a combined total of 55 4. Since the article by Wakefield et al 16 was initially published, authors have mostly cited the article in a negative manner Figure 1. Authors who affirmed the article by Wakefield et al 16 in their citations comprised 94 of the total citing works 8.

Of the affirmative citations, 49 of 94 Of these 15 affirmative self-citing works, 10 include at least 1 coauthor of the original article.

The only other self-citing work by the original authors of the article by Wakefield et al 16 is the partial retraction by Murch et al, 17 which was characterized as negative. From the date of the partial retraction on March 4, , to March 11, , a total of works were published that cited the article by Wakefield et al.

Of 57 citing works published in , a total of 10 However, the reviewers began the retraction analysis Figure 2 in to compensate for works that were submitted for publication before the partial retraction was published and to ensure that the retraction information was indexed in bibliographic databases, making it more likely to be discovered.

Between and , a total of of In , editors of The Lancet issued a notice of retraction 18 to the article by Wakefield et al. The number of authors who documented the partial retraction or the notice of retraction between and increased to of Since , the percentage of authors who have documented either retraction continually improved, and in , a total of 54 of 61 citing works We found that authors documented the retraction in different ways.

Of the citing works that documented either retraction, The first aim of this study was to assign a characteristic to each citing work of the article by Wakefield et al 16 to determine how authors cited the information. Most authors cited the article by Wakefield et al 16 in a negative manner. Even before the article was formally retracted, authors were asserting that there were problems with the study, including the small sample size 24 - 26 and the lack of epidemiologic evidence to support the increased risk of autism after receiving the MMR vaccine.

Thus, although this was a highly influential article, it is an example of how high citation count may not equate with a high-quality work. There were common themes among these citing works. The second aim of this study was to record whether the retractions were accurately documented. The ICMJE recommendations for manuscript preparations suggest that authors are responsible for ensuring that reference lists are accurate, that authors use PubMed as an authoritative source for information about retractions, and that authors should note the retracted status of the article in the citation when citing a retracted article.

There are challenges in identifying and documenting retracted literature. First, bibliographic databases have differing policies on indexing retractions. The notice of retraction is also indexed using the same title and authors as the original item so that any title or author search that retrieves the original will also retrieve the notice of retraction.

In contrast to Web of Science, PubMed connects citations for original articles and citations for notices of retraction based on information supplied by the journal publisher within their database and includes a banner that indicates that the publication is retracted but does not change the title of the original publication.

Many information users may overlook this indication. Second, journals have differing policies on how they update articles that have been retracted. For example, JAMA adds a watermark with the word retraction in red letters to the article record on their website, and the PDF versions of retracted articles are marked with a header to alert the reader that the article has been retracted, per COPE recommendations.

The Lancet , on the other hand, updates the item record of the article to include the word retracted at the beginning of the title. When article information is downloaded into citation management software, the retraction information is labeled.

Changing the article title makes it easier for bibliographic databases to capture the retraction information as well. Third, not all citation styles provide guidelines for citing retractions. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , sixth edition 43 does not contain instructions for citing a retracted article. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children [retracted in: Lancet. The text within the brackets was manually added to the reference by the authors.

In this example, only the notice of retraction was documented. It is not clear from the AMA Manual of Style whether notice of partial retraction should also be included in the citation. Authors may not be aware that their citation management software is not properly citing a retracted article, and journal editors and article reviewers are likely relying on authors to ensure that their citations are correct.

Fourth, a retraction can occur after a bibliographic reference has been downloaded into citation management software; thus, an information user may not be aware of a subsequent retraction. Zotero 45 now includes an enhancement that will identify retracted articles that have been downloaded into a Zotero library, but not all citation management software includes this feature.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work , follow us on Twitter , like us on Facebook , add us to your RSS reader , or subscribe to our daily digest. For comments or feedback, email us at team retractionwatch. Indeed, fraudulent is a strong term. That is due to malignant misinformers—which includes Wakefield and his big-name allies—who are completely unaffected by how citation software works. I have the impression that many authors do not check the references in their submitted manuscripts.

As a referee, I generally read through the list of cited references and often notice errors. Not infrequently, to my surprise, the errors are such as to suggest the authors are entering references manually. For example, names may be misspelled or a multi-part last name may be rendered incorrectly even though it is correct in PubMed.

In other cases, the citation manager software generates peculiar abbreviations, e. I wonder how widespread the use of citation manager software actually is. She may well be right. So they might have read it without realizing that it had later been retracted. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content. Elizabeth Suelzer. Share this: Email Facebook Twitter.

Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Negative association between MMR and autism. Autism and measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine: No epidemiologic evidence for a causal association. Time trends in autism and in MMR immunization coverage in California. Retraction of an interpretation. Horton R. A statement by the editors of The Lancet. Eggertson L. Lancet retracts year-old article linking autism to MMR vaccines. Retraction-Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, nonspecific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.

Godlee F. The fraud behind the MMR scare. Deer B. How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed. Secrets of the MMR scare. How the vaccine crisis was meant to make money.