Citation penalties following sexual versus scientific misconduct allegations.

ABSTRACT:

Background and aim

Citations in academia have long been regarded as a fundamental means of acknowledging the contribution of past work and promoting scientific advancement. The aim of this paper was to investigate the impact that misconduct allegations made against scholars have on the citations of their work, comparing allegations of sexual misconduct (unrelated to the research merit) and allegations of scientific misconduct (directly related to the research merit).

Methods

We collected citation data from the Web of Science (WoS) in 2021, encompassing 31,941 publications from 172 accused and control scholars across 18 disciplines. We also conducted two studies: one on non-academics (N = 231) and one on academics (N = 240).

Results

The WoS data shows that scholars acc

SUBMITTER: Maimone G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11882088 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature