38.1% of citations to retracted economics papers still cite them as support.
Close to medicine (40.7%). 231 citations to 130 retracted economics papers, all made after the retraction. Only 1.3% mention the retraction.
Cite the retracted paper as support, after the retraction
Why it matters. Retracted research keeps being cited as support outside medicine too, about as often.
A pilot. The citing papers come from free full text in PubMed Central, mostly biomedical, health and environmental journals, so this shows how economics retractions are cited there, not in economics journals.
A pilot. Citing papers from PubMed Central full text.
Source: SaneCite economics pilot: 231 citations to 130 papers Retraction Watch tags as business or economics, retracted 1990–2023. Three AI models labelled each citation; pending human review. The data. Data as of 29 Oct 2026.
Source: SaneCite economics pilot, 231 citations, 29 Oct 2026, pending human review · sanecite.com/charts
Show the numbers
| Field | Citations judged | Cited as support | Share (95% CI, %) | Retracted papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Economics (pilot) | 231 | 88 | 38.1% (32.1–44.5) | 130 |
| Medicine (Phase 2 census) | 51,626 | 21,037 | 40.7% (39.9–41.5) | 12,328 |
Economics: papers Retraction Watch tags as business or economics, retracted 1990–2023, cited after the retraction in PubMed Central full text. Three AI models labelled each citation. The economics interval is a Wilson interval; the medicine interval comes from re-running the numbers over whole retracted papers. 3 of the 231 economics citations mention the retraction.
Free to share, with credit.
Download the image, paste the caption, or link to this page. Please credit SaneCite (sanecite.com). The numbers come from the pilot's open data; nothing here is picked by hand.
- How it was read.Three AI models from different families labelled every citing passage, with the same labels as the medicine census. Before the run, their labels were checked against blind reference labels on a separate set, as the pilot's plan required. These are AI readings, pending human review.
- What a citation is here.One later paper citing one retracted economics paper, in a year after the retraction. Citations to paperwork retractions, which find no fault in the work, are set aside.
- What it covers.Papers Retraction Watch tags as business or economics, retracted 1990 to 2023, with a DOI, and the open-access papers in PubMed Central that cite them after the retraction. Those citing papers are mostly biomedical, health and environmental journals, so this is how economics retractions are cited there, not in economics journals. It is a pilot, much smaller than the medicine census.
- Check it yourself.This chart's data · the pilot's results · its section on the Charts page · code and data.