Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr In August 2015, bioengineers gathered in Milan, Italy, for the 37th annual conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. About 2,000 papers we… | Continue reading
A preprint promoted by a member of the UK Parliament for claiming to show that vitamin D led to an “80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths” has been removed from a server used … | Continue reading
via Pixy Last year, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology found itself on the receiving end of what its editor Roland Seifert called a “massive attack of fraudulent papers” that were the p… | Continue reading
A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year. The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a p… | Continue reading
David Sanders An anniversary has prompted this reconsideration of the revolution in biochemistry that wasn’t: the “arsenic bacteria.” Just over 10 years have passed since an infamous Dec. 2, 2010, … | Continue reading
Carol Shoshkes Reiss Carol Shoshkes Reiss describes it as “especially striking.” I have been Editor-in-Chief of DNA and Cell Biology for the last decade. It has been rare for authors to request wi… | Continue reading
As Retraction Watch readers may know, as part of keeping our database of retractions up to date, we’ve been publishing a running list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted. That list has been… | Continue reading
Hampton Gaddy An undergraduate student in the United Kingdom has taken to task the editors of a purportedly scholarly journal for having published more than 100 papers by a Maltese researcher with … | Continue reading
A Nature journal has announced that it is conducting a “priority” investigation into a new paper claiming that women in science fare better with male rather than female mentors. The article, “The … | Continue reading
The paper’s graphical abstract Sometimes, we just don’t know what to say. So we’ll let the people of Twitter comment on a paper titled “Can Traditional Chinese Medicine prov… | Continue reading
PLOS ONE has issued an expression of concern for a paper it published last month suggesting that vitamin D might protect against severe COVID-19. Central to the concerns is that the authors s… | Continue reading
Retraction Watch readers are no doubt familiar with the case of Andrew Wakefield, the former gastroenterologist who led a 1998 paper in The Lancet — now retracted — that led him to clai… | Continue reading
To the list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted so far, add this: The Korean Journal of Anesthesiology has retracted an article it published last month on ventilating COVID patients b… | Continue reading
As we celebrate our tenth birthday and look forward to our second decade, we thought it would be a good time to take stock and reflect on some lessons we — and others — have learned. Re… | Continue reading
Lawrence Mead Less than two weeks after publication, an essay on poverty and race which critics decried as “unscholarly” and “overtly racist” has been retracted. The essay, by Lawrence Mead, of New… | Continue reading
Nandita Quaderi This is an invited guest post related to news about two suppression reversals announced today by Clarivate. The research process is rarely straightforward. There are a myriad of way… | Continue reading
Lawrence Mead Hundreds of academics, anti-poverty advocates and others have signed petitions demanding the journal Society retract a new commentary which argues, in essence, that poor Black and His… | Continue reading
Kenneth Witwer Nature has retracted a recent commentary after the author complained that he had been misled by the relationship of the publication to a financial sponsor and told to avoid critiquin… | Continue reading
Clarivate’s logo More than 70% of the citations in one journal were to other papers in that journal. Another published a single paper that cited nearly 200 other articles in the journal. Now,… | Continue reading
Frits Rosendaal A March 2020 paper that set off months of angry debates about whether hydroxychloroquine is effective in treating COVID-19 has “gross methodological shortcomings” that “do not justi… | Continue reading
James Heathers Yesterday, dozens of scientists petitioned the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to “retract a paper on the effectiveness of masks, saying the study has R… | Continue reading
The authors of a paper that some critics have labeled white supremacy in academic robes say they will be retracting the article because some of the data they’d used for their analysis were “highly … | Continue reading
Just because you work in a lab doesn’t mean you get to call the data you produce your own. Ask Constantin Heil. In the mid-2010s, Heil was a PhD student at La Sapienza University in Rome, where he … | Continue reading
Ludwigshafen Hospital, via Wikimedia Score one for responsiveness. In mid-May, we reported on the retraction of three review articles by Joachim Boldt, whose papers continue to fall despite h… | Continue reading
A schematic based on the now-retracted findings, as published in newspapers A study which found that aerosolized novel coronavirus could be spread nearly 15 feet — twice what health officials… | Continue reading
Didier Raoult The paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement … | Continue reading
In 2005, Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada published a paper in American Psychologist making a bold and specific claim: …the authors predict that a ratio of positive to negative affect a… | Continue reading
via NASA A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who cal… | Continue reading
Frances Arnold A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results. Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 pri… | Continue reading
Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process | Continue reading
James Heathers We have a tension about resolving inaccuracies in scientific documents when they’re past a certain age. Specifically, what should we do with old papers that are shown to be not… | Continue reading
via Wikipedia Nature is retracting a 2018 paper which found that the oceans are warming much faster than predicted by previous models of climate change. The article, “Quantification of ocean heat u… | Continue reading
The Journal of Clinical Investigation has retracted two papers from the lab of one of Stanford University’s most prominent cancer researchers over concerns about the integrity of the data. The art… | Continue reading
John Ioannidis is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” One of the most highly cited researchers in the world, Ioannidis, a professor at … | Continue reading
PLoS ONE has retracted a meta-analysis on mindfulness after determining that the authors used dubious methodology and failed to adequately report their financial interest in the psychological treat… | Continue reading
The authors of an much-ballyhooed 2017 paper about the spread of fake news on social media have retracted their article after finding that they’d botched their analysis. The paper, “Limited individ… | Continue reading
Here’s a mystery: How did a nonexistent paper rack up hundreds of citations? Pieter Kroonenberg, an emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University in The Netherlands, was puzzled when he tri… | Continue reading
Jeff Offutt, a professor of software engineering at George Mason University, has some stories to tell. He says that when one of his students wrote his first paper, the student reused four paragraph… | Continue reading
Readers, this is a big day for us. We’re officially launching the Retraction Watch Database of more than 18,000 retractions, along with a six-page package of stories and infographics based on it th… | Continue reading
Readers, this is a big day for us. We’re officially launching the Retraction Watch Database of more than 18,000 retractions, along with a six-page package of stories and infographics based on it th… | Continue reading
Better late than never? Or too little too late? Those are two different ways to look at a recent retraction. Eight years after one of the most infamous retractions in science — that of the 19… | Continue reading
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the story of a paper about gender differences by two mathematicians. Last month, in Weekend Reads, we highlighted an account of that story, which appea… | Continue reading
Who has the most retractions? Here’s our unofficial list (see notes on methodology), which we’ll update as more information comes to light: Yoshitaka Fujii (total retractions: 183) See … | Continue reading