An Australian investigation into COVID-19 research found that among the more than 270,000 papers that have been published since the start of the pandemic, 212 retracted papers were cited 2,697 times, with a median of seven times per paper.
Publishing processes were often compromised with COVID-19, according to the co-author of the investigation and director of Cochrane Australia Steve McDonald.
“We saw this push to get information out quickly, and with many more people doing and rapidly publishing COVID research, there’s been a spike in retractions,” senior research fellow McDonald said.
Eighteen percent of citations from retracted papers were critical and “may have directly impacted patient care,” the authors wrote in their paper (pdf)….