“They Only Silence the Truth”: COVID-19 retractions and the politicization of science is a research paper published in Public Understanding of Science (2024). On theSindex it has a DataRank of 0.208. It has been cited 3 times, with 3 citing works in its 1-hop citation network.
Retracted COVID-19 articles have circulated widely on social media. Although retractions are intended to correct the scientific record, when trust in science is low, they may instead be interpreted as evidence of censorship or simply ignored. We performed a content analysis of tweets about the two most widely shared retracted COVID-19 articles, Mehra20 and Rose21, before and after their retractions. When Mehra20 was seen as a politicized attack on Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine, its retraction was broadly shared as proof that the article had been published for political reasons. However, when Rose21 was seen as evidence of vaccine harm by vaccine opponents, its retraction was either ignored or else framed as a conspiracy to censor the truth. These results demonstrate how retractions can be selectively used by scientific counterpublics to reframe the regulation of science as evidence of its institutional corruption.
FAIR checklist signals are shown for context only and do not affect DataRank scoring.
Base Score Contribution
0.208
From this paper's citation signal
Citation Network Contribution
0
From 0 citing papers with measurable signal
This paper's DataRank is currently driven only by its base citation score. None of the citing papers had measurable citation signal.
Learn more about DataRank methodology →DataRank blends this paper's own citation count with the influence of the papers that cite it. Here, roughly 100% comes from its base citations and 0% from the citation network.
Citers are pulled from OpenAlex sorted by cited_by_count:descand capped per paper, so when the cap binds we keep the highest-signal references and the score is reproducible across reruns.