Four sleuths, authors of a new preprint – the University of Aberdeen’s Hugo Studd and Alison Avenell and the University of Auckland’s Andrew Grey and Mark J. Bolland – charted citation data for 172 papers on clinical trials from Zatollah Asemi, a nutrition researcher at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, whose work has come under scrutiny.

Of these, 23 had been retracted, 38 had expressions of concern, 41 had some other type of editorial notice, and 70 had not been subject to any flag. The randomized controlled trials reported in the articles examined had collectively been cited more than 10,000 times in more than 6,000 articles. For both the flagged articles and those with no notices, “citations increased steadily, peaking 45-65 months post-publication,” with similar declines thereafter. The researchers found “little evidence that publication of an editorial response, whether it was retraction, publication of an EoC or issuing of an editorial notice, had any meaningful effect on the rate of citation.”

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/04/27/citation-rates-retracted-corrected-articles-asemi-clinical-trials/

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