chem-bla-ics
Published February 16, 2025 | https://doi.org/10.59350/w4zj3-mbw53

Retracted articles in Wikidata

Creators & Contributors

  • 1. ROR icon Maastricht University

A good number of years ago, a colleague and I explored if we could get access to the Retraction Watch Database, but we could not afford it. We have been using data on retractions for curate our databases, like WikiPathways. A database should not contain knowledge based on (only) a retracted article. Wikidata, btw, has a small number (499) of statements supported by retracted articles. Similarly, it turns out that I am citing retracted articles in two papers (and a preprint of one of them).

Wikidata has a good number of retracted articles in their database (some 21 thousand at the time of writing). A lot of this data comes from CrossRef, that recently acquired the Retraction Watch Database (doi:10.13003/c23rw1d9)) and started providing the content as FAIR and Open data. With a Bacting-based script I am regularly updating Wikidata with annotations from CrossRef, giving a rich dataset in Wikidata around the queries. Over the past few years I have written various SPARQL queries to show the results which today I collected under a single home:

Additional details

Description

A good number of years ago, a colleague and I explored if we could get access to the Retraction Watch Database, but we could not afford it. We have been using data on retractions for curate our databases, like WikiPathways. A database should not contain knowledge based on (only) a retracted article. Wikidata, btw, has a small number (499) of statements supported by retracted articles.

Identifiers

UUID
abc6a5bd-5771-46cb-9757-827d59f3ae3f
GUID
https://doi.org/10.59350/w4zj3-mbw53
URL
https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2025/02/16/retraction-data-in-wikidata.html

Dates

Issued
2025-02-16T01:00:00
Updated
2025-02-16T01:00:00

References

  1. Agrawal, A., Balcı, H., Hanspers, K., Coort, S. L., Martens, M., Slenter, D. N., Ehrhart, F., Digles, D., Waagmeester, A., Wassink, I., Abbassi-Daloii, T., Lopes, E. N., Iyer, A., Acosta, J. M., Willighagen, L. G., Nishida, K., Riutta, A., Basaric, H., Evelo, C. T., … Pico, A. R. (2023). WikiPathways 2024: next generation pathway database. Nucleic Acids Research, 52(D1), D679–D689. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad960
  2. Crossref, Hendricks, G., Center for Scientific Integrity, & Lammey, R. (2023). Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community. Crossref. [cito:citesAsEvidence] https://doi.org/10.13003/c23rw1d9

Citations

  1. Yao, L., Gu, T., Li, X., Jiao, Y., Li, M., Graff, C., Gu, W., & Wang, M. (2025). ChatGPT4o, Deepseek, and Grok 3 distort scientific references differently when wrestling with retracted articles on stem cells - a real challenge to applications of AI in the medical field (Preprint). In Journal of Medical Internet Research. JMIR Publications Inc. https://doi.org/10.2196/preprints.79284