Fabricated citations have increased dramatically recently and have sparked debates about how to address this problem within scholarly publishing. When these citations are discovered, those articles frequently get retracted. However, there is a time lag.

So what’s a librarian or researcher to do? How can we keep retracted articles out of our literature searches?

At this year’s Medical Library Association conference, I learned about a strategy in a paper session entitled, “Identifying Retractions in Systematic Review Searching” by Caitlin J. Bakker et al. In their presentation, the authors describe a multistep process to identify retracted papers using the citation manager Zotero and the LibKey Nomad browser extension paired with Covidence, the systematic review screening software.

Zotero has a built-in feature, which automatically flags retracted articles at the item level using data from Retraction Watch. The presenters recommend running database searches and importing citations first into Zotero, followed by Covidence during title and abstract screening. They use this process first at the outset; again prior to data extraction and finally, before submitting manuscripts for publication.