PLOS One issues Expression of Concern over tourism study citing retracted papers
PLOS One has issued an Expression of Concern for a 2024 article on intelligent tourism development, public services, and environmental and cultural values after editors identified problems in the paper’s reference base and peer review history. The notice does not retract the study, but it does place a formal warning on the record and tells readers to treat the article cautiously.
The editorial concern centers on citation integrity. One reference used in the article had already been retracted before publication, and three additional cited papers were later retracted after the article appeared. In a field that depends on technical framing, quantitative modeling, and policy-relevant interpretation, the stability of the evidence chain matters as much as the model itself. Once the supporting literature is compromised, confidence in the conclusions weakens, even if the main manuscript remains formally published.
The notice refers to the article “Analyzing intelligent tourism development and public services based on a fuzzy genetic hybrid system to promote environmental and cultural values”, published in PLoS One in 2024. The concern was issued by the PLOS One Editors in 2026. The publication record now carries an explicit editorial caution, a signal that the paper should not be read as settled or fully dependable without checking the underlying sources.
One sentence in the editorial notice does the most important work: readers are advised to interpret the article with caution.
Retractions in the reference list raise questions about evidentiary support
A paper’s reference list is not decorative. It is the scaffolding that supports methods, background claims, and the logic connecting a proposed system to prior work. When that scaffolding includes a paper that was already retracted, the problem begins before any reader reaches the discussion section. A retracted citation can distort the foundation of the argument, especially when it is used to justify a method, a design choice, or a conceptual framework.
In this case, Reference 5 had been retracted before the PLoS One article was published. That alone is enough to trigger concern because it means the manuscript entered the literature already leaning on a source the scientific record had withdrawn. Three other cited papers — References 1, 12, and 34 — were retracted after publication. Even when those later retractions did not precede the article itself, they complicate how the paper is now read, cited, and used in downstream work.
The effect is cumulative. A single retracted citation can sometimes be explained as an isolated oversight, but multiple retracted references indicate a broader problem with source selection and literature vetting. For readers, that raises a practical question: how much of the paper’s reasoning still stands if part of its intellectual base has been removed from the record?
Peer review concerns amplify the editorial warning
The editorial notice also states that PLOS One has concerns about the article’s peer review. That matters because peer review is the main quality-control layer between a submitted manuscript and the published literature. When editors question that process, the issue extends beyond one flawed citation trail. It suggests that the safeguards meant to catch weak evidence, mismatched references, or unsupported claims may not have functioned as intended.
This is the kind of problem that can be hard to quantify from the outside. The notice does not describe specific reviewer failures, and it does not assign blame to any individual. Still, the combination of compromised citations and peer review concerns is enough to justify a public warning. In a reputable journal, an Expression of Concern is not a routine administrative note; it is a formal marker that a paper’s credibility is under review and should not be assumed intact.
Readers who encounter the article now have to interpret it through that lens. Any claims drawn from the paper should be cross-checked against other independent sources, especially if those claims were built on the retracted literature now sitting in its bibliography.
What the notice means for downstream readers and citations
Expressions of Concern serve a specific purpose in scientific publishing. They preserve the record while alerting the community that caution is warranted. That approach is different from a retraction, which removes confidence in a paper to a much greater degree. Here, the article remains in the literature, but with a warning attached that changes how it should be used.
For researchers, the most direct consequence is citation hygiene. A paper flagged for retracted references and peer review concerns should not be cited as a stable authority without careful review. For editors and reviewers, the notice is a reminder that citation checks are not clerical details; they are part of scientific quality control. For readers, the message is even simpler: the paper is available, but it is not clean.
The subject matter itself — intelligent tourism development tied to public services and environmental and cultural values — sits outside clinical medicine, yet the editorial principle is familiar across disciplines. Evidence loses force when its supporting literature is unstable. A model can be mathematically elaborate and still rest on compromised foundations. In that setting, the appearance of precision can be misleading if the source material has already been weakened by retraction.
The PLOS One notice leaves the article in place while marking it for caution. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the only action described in the editorial record provided here. The paper now carries a formal warning, and any use of its findings should account for the retracted citations and the unresolved peer review concerns embedded in the journal’s notice.