While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.
“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”
Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.
By his calculation, Elsevier’s retraction rate was 3.97 articles per 10,000 published. This compared to 5.46 for SAGE, 6.21 for Wiley, 6.50 for Taylor & Francis, 9.06 for Springer Nature, 17.70 for IEEE, 26.82 for PLOS and 283.77 for IOS Press.
Readers of Retraction Watch won’t be surprised the highest retraction rate showed up at Hindawi, at 320.02 per 10,000. Wiley acquired the publisher in 2023 and the high number of retractions – including over 11,000 from late 2022 to early 2024 – is “consistent with the mass retractions following Wiley’s acquisition,” Oppenlaender wrote.
Of the 98 articles in the dataset reinstated following retraction, 86 were published in Elsevier journals. That publisher restored 1.3% of retracted articles. Only Taylor & Francis came anywhere close, with a reinstatement rate of 0.4%.
The most common reasons for retraction among the top nine publishers were issues with results and/or conclusions, third-party involvement or concerns, plagiarism, data concerns, and problematic peer review. Yet Oppenlaender found seven of the 10 most common retraction reasons – including misconduct, plagiarism, and data concerns – were “entirely absent” from ACM’s record.
Of 354 retractions by ACM in the dataset, all but two were retracted as a result of compromised peer review of two sets of conference proceedings, with no retractions before 2020. As we reported in 2022, ACM retracted more than 300 conference papers at once.
Oppenlaender contended in the preprint that ACM moves at least a portion of its retracted articles to a “dark archive,” which “means that some retracted or removed content may not appear in any public database, including Retraction Watch[‘s], potentially leading to under-reporting of ACM retractions.”
“This doesn’t fit with reality,” Scott Delman, ACM’s director of publications, told us by email. “Articles that are ‘removed’ for one of the reasons indicated in our [Retractions] Policy would still have citation pages available along with a Notice of Removal.”
As for ACM being an anomaly when it comes to reasons for retraction, “What I would say is that our threshold for proving misconduct is ‘extremely high,’” Delman said. “At any given moment, ACM is investigating well over 100 allegations of misconduct.”
In 2023, ACM claimed it would retract two papers by a deepfake pioneer for misconduct. They still have not been retracted. When we asked for an update on these articles, Delman told us “an appeal was filed as per ACM’s Appeals Policy, and this case has been awaiting a formal review by the ACM Appeals Committee.”
Oppenlaender also found the timing between publication of a paper and retraction varied from weeks to years, with PLOS’ “lag” averaging over four years. IEEE’s relatively short time between article publication and retraction — 41 days — “shows that it is feasible to issue fast retractions on a large-scale,” he said. Nearly all of its retractions, over 99%, were completed within a year, according to the preprint.
Both Elsevier and Springer Nature showed “steady growth” of retraction rates over the past decade. As for geography, Springer Nature had a cluster of retractions for researchers in India classified as “Rogue Editor,” which “is largely unique among the publishers examined,” Oppenlaender said.
Our database uses the “Rogue Editor” classification for retractions caused by false or forged editor credentials, or when an editor subverts at least one process under their purview. The cluster corresponds with mass retractions we have covered.
For each of the nine publishers with the most retractions, China-affiliated authors “account for the largest share of retractions at every publisher examined, reflecting systemic pressures,” according to the preprint. In terms of national affiliations of authors on retracted works, China accounted for 52.54%, India for 7.25%, the U.S. for 5.72%, Saudi Arabia for 2.83%, Iran for 2.51%, and the U.K. for 2.10%.
With reporting by Avery Orrall
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Part of the explanation re: ACM’s nonsense is that they can’t be bothered to add metadata to their DOIs like they’re supposed to, so even their few recent retractions don’t show up.
But of course, this study reflects the reality of automated tooling trying to find retractions: authors won’t know if an ACM paper they cite has been retracted for the same reason. Metadata is important. One would imagine a computer science society would know this.