Most of the articles retracted due to "irregularities with respect to submission, authorship, and peer review" have ZERO self-citation
Up to recently, Springer Nature have retracted 59 articles due to "irregularities with respect to submission, authorship, and peer review", "irregularities with respect to submission and authorship", "irregularities in authorship during the submission process" and other similar reasons. 58% (34/59) of them have zero self-citation, suggesting that "ZERO self-citation" may be an indicator for problematic articles.
On January 11th, 2025, the 5GH Team searched on the SpringLink website with the keywords "Retraction Note"+irregularities+authorship, and found the above-mentioned articles. More articles may be retracted due to similar reason(s), but were not included in this analysis due to the limitation of our search strategy.
Among the above-mentioned 59 articles, 27 articles were published or issued in 2017 or before, according to the DOI numbers for those articles. Those articles were mostly from China or Iran, and higher proportion (74%, 20/27) of them have zero self-citation.
Previous investigation [1] also suggests that retracted articles are more likely to have zero self-citation. Springer Nature retracted 23 articles in 2025 (up to January 10th), 12 (52%) of them have zero self-citation. Therefore, we should pay more caution when we evaluate an article with zero self-citation.
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