Mapping Science - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 292

Fig. 8.11 The survival function of retraction. The probability of surviving retraction for 4 years
or more is below 0.2

8.3.3 Retracted Articles in Context

Tab le 8.13 lists the ten most highly cited retracted articles in the Web of Science.
The 1998 Lancet paper by Wakefield et al. has the highest citations of 740. The
least cited of the ten has 366 citations. Three papers on the list were published in
Science and two in Lancet. In the rest of the article, we will primarily focus on these
high-profile retractions in terms of their citation contexts at both macroscopic and
microscopic levels.
We are interested in depicting the context of retracted articles in a co-citation
network of a broadly defined and relevant set of scientific publications. First, we
retrieved 29,756 articles that cited 1,584 retracted articles in the Web of Science.
We use CiteSpace to generate a co-citation network based on the collective citation
behavior of the 29,756 articles between 1998 and 2011. The top 50 % most cited
references were included to the formation of the co-citation network with an upper
limit of 3,000 references per year. The resultant network contains 7,217 references
and 155,391 co-citation links. A visualization of the co-citation network is generated