With the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, new information is constantly being demanded, received, and overburdened to the point of its reliability being questioned. The rise of the infodemic during COVID-19 has become an increasingly threatening issue as misinformation oftentimes spreads as rapid fire through the press of a button.1 In the era of a technology-versed generation, information can be spread within seconds and made viral within minutes. Consequently, the fragility of using scientific information on an online platform such as social media is extremely risky, especially when such information is dependent on many lives.123 Retracted articles play a huge responsibility in confuting misinformation and curbing the widespread infodemic.4

The COVID-19 race for research publications is still on full speed as researchers are keen to investigate the gray areas in managing this sinister illness.5 The topic is in great demand by journals and time restrictions lead researchers to rush and submit their work, consequently realizing in the post-publication review that inconsistencies were made causing its retraction or correction. However, post-retraction spread of misinformation through social media has been an ongoing concern and the exponential rise in COVID-19 related articles has exacerbated the phenomenon.6 With the tentative and sensitive COVID-19 related information, readers have fallen prey to the infodemic regardless of the attempts made in retraction and correction. Moreover, a lesser known concern is the preprint publication of false research that has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic.7 Preprints are typically unrefined pre-publications of peer-reviewed papers that are placed almost immediately after some superficial screening. This allows information to reach readers quickly while bypassing the long-drawn process required in officially publishing through peer-reviewed journals.

With greater use of social media platforms for post publication and preprint promotions of research articles, retracted articles tend to receive approximately the same attention.2 The generations are quickly picking up on the use of social media thus expanding its exploitation especially during the time of a health crisis.8 This causes the spread of falsified information without warning of its retraction from the journal. Social media plays a huge role in marketing fresh research but retracted articles also receive the same attention. However, retracted articles are usually popular for its misinformation rather than its reason for retraction, building a community of misinformants.9 The issue of retracted articles is greatly overlooked but its consequences are of widespread disinformation as research proves that retracted articles still continue to circulate.10

Hence, we systematically analyzed retracted articles from retractionwatch.com to look at the Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) garnered over a period of time. AAS is a widely used metric to reflect on societal impact of research output by providing an indicator of the amount of attention that it has received.11 It is a reliable form of calculating the total outreach an article has received including that through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, video uploaders and news.6 We hope to highlight the role of social media in advertising retracted articles and its effect on the spread of COVID-19 linked misinformation.

Retractionwatch.com was searched for COVID-19 related papers on November 6th, 2021. All the articles recorded on the website during that day were considered during the search. The exclusion criteria was the lack of digital object identifier (DOI) and if they were preprint articles. Further exclusion was done for absent AAS and incomplete AAS due to lack of pre retraction, post retraction, or both scores. The media platforms that were investigated for attention scores were Altmetric, Mendeley users, Dimensions, Twitter, News outlet, blogs, Facebook, Reddit, and video uploaders.

A total of 196 articles were found on the Retraction Watch website of which 189 were retracted papers and 7 were expression of concern (EOC). We then identified 175 articles after excluding those that did not have a DOI (Fig. 1). A total of 30 preprint articles were also excluded giving 145 articles. There was a further exclusion of articles with absent AAS as these articles were not processed through the Altmetric system at all and resulted in 113 articles. However those without pre retraction, post retraction, or both scores were also excluded giving a total of 23 articles. One article was excluded at the end of this process due to the reason of EOC being revoked by the journal completely.

A table was curated of all the 22 articles to show the attention scores from Altmetric, Mendeley users, Dimensions, Twitter, News outlet, blogs, Facebook, Reddit, and video uploaders (Table 1). The highest pre-retraction and post-retraction attention score are both from Twitter of 14,681 and 2,793 respectively. These scores both belong to the article “The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy” that also has the highest AAS (10,294, 2,146) amongst the other retracted articles in Table 1. The highest pre-retraction score for Mendeley is 668 in the article “SARS-CoV-2 Infects T Lymphocytes Through Its Spike Protein-Mediated Membrane Fusion” and post-retraction score is 123 in the article “Chinese Medical Staff Request International Medical Assistance in Fighting Against COVID-19.”

All the articles under Mendeley had scores greater than or equal to 20 (23 articles) while Twitter had the majority of articles that were scored greater than 100 (11 articles). Dimension, a searching database for research, had the highest pre-retraction score of 172 for the article “Obesity and Mortality of COVID-19. Meta-Analysis” and post-retraction score of 52 for the article “SARS-CoV-2 Infects T Lymphocytes Through Its Spike Protein-Mediated Membrane Fusion.” News outlet’s highest pre-retraction score is 349 for the article, “Unexpected Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in the Prepandemic Period in Italy” and post-retraction score is 20 for the article, “Effectiveness of Surgical and Cotton Masks in Blocking SARS-CoV-2: A Controlled Comparison in 4 Patients.” Blogs, Facebook, Reddit, and video uploaders did not have significant scores for comparison.

In the span of the first year of the pandemic, more than 100,000 COVID-19 related articles have been published and around 68 of those articles have been retracted as conveyed by Retraction Watch in January, 2021.1213 With more than 6 months gone since January 2021, the number of retracted articles reached a total of 149 which is an increase of more than 50% as shown on Retraction Watch. This shows an alarmingly large increase in retracted articles to which greater attention was possibly brought by the pandemic. COVID-19 attracted enormous attention to the world of research as people were avid to learn about the newly found virus by reading all the latest research articles published.1415 COVID-19 associated articles were found to be of the top 3 most cited articles in 2020 according to the British Medical Journal.16

Social media is a widely used source that is depended on a daily basis for entertainment, news, networking, politics, and even scientific research.1718 It is a heavily based platform to spread thousands and thousands of different subjects, discussions, concepts, and any other matter one can imagine.19 In regards to the COVID-19 retracted articles, social media plays a significant role in spreading the misinformation as healthcare workers, patients, and the mere public are almost completely reliant towards it.20 Although some research was done on the hazards of social media in spreading COVID-19 related misinformation, very little investigation is available on its hazard in spreading COVID-19 related retracted articles.221 Retracted articles are considered more detrimental to the scientific community than misinformation created solely from social media.22 Therefore, an investigation was carried out in our research to evaluate the AAS of retracted articles. In this case, it helped identify the total outreach through these platforms in the post-retraction and pre-retraction period to see the distribution of attention.

Our analysis showed that 39.1% of retracted articles in Table 1 had a post-retraction AAS greater than 20 which is found to be significant according to the Altmetric guidelines.23 Additionally, many of the scores that were greater than 100 stem from Twitter, but the platform with the majority of scores greater than 20 is Mendeley. This proves that citation count is very high on Mendeley which is also reinforced in a similar study done on the citation counts between Mendeley readership and AAS.24 Regardless, Twitter has received twice the amount of attention due to its powerful exposure and spread of information to not just researchers but all groups of people.25

There is no increase in post-retraction scores of individual articles in comparison to pre-retraction scores across all platforms shown in Table 1. As shown in our results, the article that displayed the most attention in both the pre- and post-retraction period was called “The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy.” This is a gravely serious topic as countries across the globe are still struggling to vaccinate the entirety of their population.2627 One of the main reasons for this struggle is the “anti-vaxxer” community that believe in the majority of misinformation regarding the side effects and conspiracies behind the use of vaccines.2829 A retrospective analysis done on the power of social media in conveying the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccination supported that most of the misinformants are unreliable sources. Regardless, these sources still influence a number of patients which greatly affect their decision in receiving the vaccine. Therefore, this is a great example of how retracted articles still receive attention through social media and is still a recurring issue that intervenes in herd immunity as been proven by many other research articles. Moreover, video uploaders, Facebook, and blogs did not show significant results to compare with. Video publishers such as Youtube are also known to be a source of misinformation, however, in terms of the spread of retracted articles, it does not pose much of an issue as shown in our results.30

As the generation changes, social media begins to attract those of many age groups especially young adults.31 Studies show that social media can be a reliable source for professional development with students making the majority of this support.32 As the younger generation is influenced by social media, this reliance carries on to future professions thus building a larger impact especially in the healthcare field.3334 A great example of a famous and fraudulent influencer on social media is Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, who has published over 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines since the beginning of the pandemic.35 There has been evidence of social media spreading the misinformation in retracted articles making them so popular that its retraction is deemed insignificant at times.63637 A similar study done on post-retraction AAS shows that most retracted articles and their retraction notice receive media and social media attention.6 In fact, retracted articles tend to receive more media and social media attention than very similar, matched unretracted articles. The cause of this misinformation popularity, without any mention of its retraction, can be partly blamed on journals. Journals can take months to years to retract unreliable research and often fail to even inform the public of its invalid or fraudulent information.38 The author of this discovery, Stylianos Serghiou, explained that the reason for post-retraction popularity is in the key problems that communicate science to the public. He stressed the need to not only correct the scientific record, but as well as the public record, otherwise called social media, following the retraction of an article. Highly popularised articles should especially be given top priority in conveying its fraudulence through social media platforms.39

Preprints are another issue as a whole because the rapid review conducted for their public accessibility is superficial and carry a higher risk of an unsuccessful evaluation.40 During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints were flourishing due to a rush of novel information that had to be scrutinised in a timely manner. On the other hand, the cost of rushing the publication of such fresh information without other forms of supportive evidence carried many dangers. Since all the initial research done on COVID-19 was the only information available on that topic, readers did not have other mediums to back up the evidence and relied on the first publication they discovered. It led to a number of readers relying on false information and using that to inform the public through social media or citations in their own articles.41 A study conducted on the evolution and impact of preprints during the pandemic showed that majority of the COVID-19 articles are actually preprints which puts an even larger risk of publicising incorrect data and information.41 During our own analysis, we excluded preprints as they are not marketed on social media in the same way as peer-reviewed publications. However, the exclusion process allowed us to find that approximately 17% of retracted articles with DOIs were mainly preprints (Fig. 1).

Moreover, post publication peer-review should be more stringent, and greater attention be paid to concerns raised on social media platforms of scholarly journals by Twitter/Facebook followers.42 Our analysis on Retraction Watch proves that Twitter was the most common used platform in spreading retracted articles with scores spanning from 4 to 2,793 (Table 1). Another study done on the use of social media for academia proved that Twitter is in fact a highly used platform by researchers.43 Many famous twitter accounts have also used their popularity to debunk largely circulated myths such as that about the speed of COVID-19 vaccine production.44 Thus it is possible to circulate and even rectify scientific information in the most accurate manner possible especially giving focus to retracted articles. Modern health journalism is a two-way process, and it is about time to abide by the pace of the new digital era.45 Researches have recommended to use meticulous guidelines, ethics, and professionalism to spread scientific information on social media which is generally a contradiction to the main purpose of social media which is freedom of speech.46 However, during a global crisis, priorities need to be considered and strict limitations should be applied for scientific information.

This particular crisis of the pandemic should set an example for future calamities hence a major implementation should be done to prevent the spread of scientific falsification. The proof of the exponential rise in published articles and consequently its retraction during this crisis is an eye opener to alter the marketing of articles through social media. Journals should specifically work towards broadening their social media use by debunking false information and explicitly publicizing retracted articles as fraudulent. Journal editors play a major role in disseminating information from misinformation so a stronger editorial team is required during this time of unprecedented high submission rates.1

The limitations of our study are that real-time data was not available to access trends in AAS of social media. The variation on social media in a day to day basis after retraction is important to elaborate on the fluctuation and attention received at particular time periods or events. As social media is rapidly changing, the results are also just as variable.

In conclusion, retracted articles do have a tendency to receive a decent amount of attention than one would regard as appropriate especially for information that is false enough to be revoked from the public. The medium of attention most highly used was from Twitter and Mendeley, but a literature review found that debunking fabrication through Twitter is just as possible as spreading it. Therefore, more focus should be given by journals and their Twitter accounts to discredit all their retracted articles. Additionally, a more thorough assessment of articles should be given during the peer-review process regardless of the time restrictions because prevention is better than cure. Preprint articles are also a dubious concept when it comes to publishing accurate and precise research so the whole concept should be reconsidered for novel information.