2605.02179 Does citing a subsequently-retracted paper elevate a paper's own retraction risk beyond the same-journal, same-year, same-field baseline?
Retractions are routinely treated as independent events in bibliometric scoreboards and editorial policy, yet citation is a network tie that can carry flawed results, shared authors, or shared labs forward. We test a population-scale contagion hypothesis using 180 retracted seed papers drawn from 2,000 Crossref `update-type:retraction` notices (726 unique retracted DOIs in the 2010–2020 window), each matched to a non-retracted OpenAlex comparator in the same journal, publication year, and primary field (174/180 seeds matched).