The present study aims to fnd out the origin of authors and the main sources in which citing documents of Wakefeld’s 1998 retracted article are published in order to under stand whether they act as promoters of a negative domino efect, there is, keeping alive a retracted article due to fraudulent data and analysis on the relationship between MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. The metadata of the 1577 citing docu ments of Wakefeld’s article were downloaded from Scopus in three fles according to the year of publication: 1998–2004 (partial retraction), 2005–2010 (in between partial and full retraction) and 2011–2020 (post full retraction). The number of citing documents in each period is 329, 411 and 837, respectively. A comparison between frst and last periods indi cates an impressive growth of language, authors, countries as well as journals from broader feld coverage. Also, recent citing articles are highly cited and, even in a negative context, they contribute to the difusion of a fraudulent article in the science context. The fndings reinforce the urgency to create internal strategies in the scientifc communication process, mainly inside the editorial fow, in order to reduce the dissemination of a retracted arti cle that, in this case, is still harmful to society. At the end, the creation of an automatic mechanism to detect retracted articles included in the reference list of accepted articles is suggested.