Ashvin Narayan
Research Mentor: Anthony Million
Mentor Department: ICPSR, ISR
Author(s): AJ Million, John Kubale, Ashvin Narayan
Session: Session 4 (1:00 PM – 1:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 124
Abstract
The release and sharing of data is widely encouraged as a way of facilitating the reproduction of published findings and accelerating the progress of current research. Various stakeholders, including funding agencies and research journals, have established data-sharing requirements for research they facilitate (Borgman, 2012). However, the re-use of shared data may raise new problems—if a study associated with a particular dataset is retracted, the veracity of the data on which it was based may come into question. The lack of a specific framework for publishers and archives to respond to retractions can allow retracted works to remain in circulation long after retraction, as researchers continue to reference such works without acknowledging their removal from publication (Million & Budd, 2026). With data archives increasingly implementing protocols to ensure that released study data is accessible and re-usable (Wilkinson, 2016), the uncritical re-use of data associated with retracted works may similarly serve as a vector for the spread of misinformation. As a case study, we examine retracted works that utilise data from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The ICPSR archive is one of the oldest and largest social science data archives in the world, containing hundreds of thousands of research objects, tens of thousands of which are publicly accessible. By cross-referencing the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-Related Literature against the Retraction Watch database, we identify nine retracted papers associated with data in the ICPSR repository. Using data from Web of Science and Elsevier, we examine citations of each paper before and after retraction, finding that while citations of some retracted papers reduced after retraction, others continued to be cited with similar or greater frequency. We additionally examine reasons for paper retractions to determine whether the issues raised concerning retracted works likely extend to the associated data in the ICPSR repository.
