Retracting a paper removes it from the record of what is known. It does not remove it from the literature. This is every retraction notice Retraction Watch has catalogued, joined to the citation history of each paper — so you can watch what happened after the withdrawal.
Drag across the bars to narrow to a span of years. The tall bar is 2023.
The second box keeps only papers whose whole citation history is visible in the data, which is what the afterlife numbers are computed from.
Click any mark in the field to open the paper behind it — title, journal, every reason given, and a link to the DOI.
Citations to a retracted paper, counted by year relative to the year it was retracted. The chart follows whatever you have filtered on the bench above.
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Year 0 is the year the retraction notice appeared. Anything to the right of it is a citation to a paper that had already been withdrawn.
Retraction Watch catalogues retraction notices, by hand. OpenAlex carries a is_retracted flag drawn from publisher metadata. They overlap, and they diverge — which matters if you are building a screening step that trusts either one alone.
These are the most-cited papers that one source flags and the other does not list. Some are plainly retracted and simply absent from the hand-curated list; at least one looks like a bad flag. Neither source is wrong so much as differently scoped.
Sources, the joins, the choices, and where these numbers should not be pushed.