Retracted articles in rehabilitation: just the tip of the iceberg? A bibliometric analysis

The volume of withdrawn publications in scholarly disciplines has grown steadily, but there is little awareness about this issue in rehabilitation. The aim of this study was to analyze the extent of retracted articles pertaining to rehabilitation.

Retracted articles were searched in 4 different bibliographic databases from their inception to April 2020: PubMed, Web of Science, WikiLetters and Retraction Watch. Three independent reviewers assessed the relevance of the retrieved articles to the rehabilitation area.

Of 280 rehabilitation-related publications retracted between 1984 and 2020, 83 (29.6%) were published in 55 full open access journals and 197 (70.4%) were published in 147 traditional, non-open access or hybrid journals. In the last 10 years (2009-2018) there was a significant steady increase in both the total number of retractions (p < 0.005; r = 0.856; R² = 0.733) and retraction rate per year (p < 0.05; r = 0.751; R² = 0.564). However, the number of retractions represents a very small percentage (~ 0.1%) of the overall volume of publications in rehabilitation.

Our data indicate that the number of retracted articles in rehabilitation is increasing, although the phenomenon is still limited. However, the true prevalence of misconduct may go unnoticed due to the large number of low-quality journals not indexed in the searched databases. Physiotherapists should be aware of the danger of misleading information originating from withdrawn publications.