The Geography of Retracted Papers: Showcasing a Crossref–Dimensions–NETSCITY Pipeline for the Spatial Analysis of Bibliographic Data

A surge of retractions has been observed during the last two decades. Last year, flagship publishers even retracted hundreds of journal articles in bulk on the grounds of research misconduct. Press releases list the manipulated journals, point to offending paper mills but seldom comment on the places producing unreliable papers. We present two contributions in this paper. First, we introduce a Crossref–Dimensions–NETSCITY workflow that enables the geographic exploration of any bibliographic dataset. Second, we apply this workflow to the corpus of all 12k retracted publications extracted from Crossref (open data) and enriched with affiliation data (provided for free) exported from Dimensions. The analysis of the geographic distribution of retracted papers reveals a concentration in Asia that is increasing over time.