Suddenly, we’re 16. And what a year it has been.
Our birthday (and annual birthday post) comes on the heels of one of the biggest stories we’ve told this year: The unreported death of a 6-year-old girl whose parents paid more than $850,000 to a lab in China to develop a therapy for her rare genetic disorder. Seven days after getting the treatment, the young girl died.
Retraction Watch contributing writer Brendan Borrell spent countless hours seeking out experts in the field, chasing down documents and translations, and talking to the girl’s parents, who, after all they have been through, have one simple request: the retraction of a paper in Nature, in which the lab reports its preclinical results of the very therapy that caused their daughter’s death.
It’s an utterly heartbreaking and important story brought to light in collaboration with Science, which published the story on July 23. Just a few days later, the researchers’ university announced it would launch an investigation into the girl’s death. And a few days after that, Nature placed an editor’s note on the lab’s paper, saying it would be launching an investigation as well. The story has attracted international coverage by news outlets including the New York Post, Bloomberg, Times Higher Education, Southern Weekly and the South China Morning Post.
The story is one of more than 250 our team — Alicia Gallegos, Avery Orrall and Kate Travis, plus a small team of regular contributors — has reported in the last year. Some more highlights:
Unusual publication — and retraction — behavior regularly catches our eye. That was the case for a researcher who had 35 retractions in 24 months; a journal with half its papers citing its editor-in-chief; and a set of researchers whose h-indexes showed unusual growth. That last story came in part through work done through the Retraction Watch Sleuths in Residence Program.
And we continued our reporting on the deluge of papers from health databases with a story in Science about the rise of misleading studies based on TriNetX, a research platform that accesses data from more than 300 million electronic health records.
We wrote about a surgeon’s publication academy guaranteeing attendees a peer-reviewed paper, but that wasn’t why he caught our notice. An analysis by our Medical Evidence Project found statistical flaws in an animal study the doctor authored that was the only published report supporting the signature product of a company he founded.
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There were several government rulings and court decisions in the last several months, including rulings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. Our coverage of one of them prompted a closer look at a paper not explicitly mentioned in the investigation — but still warranted retraction.
We wrote about an administrative law judge upholding the debarment of a researcher who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch. And we’ve covered the False Claims Act, both in terms of its tenets as well as specific cases, including a $15 million settlement by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a case in progress filed against four major publishers.
Then there was the pediatrics journal in Canada that issued corrections for 138 case studies it had published over 25 years, as they neglected to mention the cases were fictionalized. Our story got picked up by NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands), AusDoc (Australia), the National Post (Canada) and Gizmodo (US).
Our list of mass resignations continues to grow; we’ve added seven to the list just this year, with editors resigning over publishing quotas, changes to peer review and author fees.
And a bit of levity: We published a guest post by a researcher frustrated by irrelevant solicitations from predatory journals, so he used ChatGPT to write a paper on how teaching math to pregnant women prompts cravings for prime numbers. And the journal published it.
Beyond the pages of Retraction Watch, we were honored to accept an invitation to testify before the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. They sought our input for an April hearing on scientific publishing that covered open access, reproducibility, predatory journals, paper mills and the incentive structures in science. The hearing attracted coverage by Nature and Inside Higher Ed. We also testified before a Canadian Parliament committee on accountability in research, our second time in front of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.
And we’ve published pieces elsewhere too. Our cofounders published an opinion piece in STAT about the mess at the American Diabetes Association — and how they seem to have lost the courage they praised them for nearly a decade ago. They also coauthored a perspective on sanctions for misconduct in anesthesia research, published in June. And an editorial in The Sunday Times Review discussed what nearly 500 retractions per month really means.
This year our parent nonprofit, the Center for Scientific Integrity, launched two new initiatives. The Retraction Watch Research Accountability Reporting Fellowship, in partnership with The Open Notebook, will provide training and mentorship to local journalists over six months. And the Ctrl-Z Award will recognize a junior and a senior researcher for the courage it takes to correct or retract their own published work.
Recipients for both of those initiatives have been chosen and we can’t wait to tell you more in the coming weeks.
The Hijacked Journal Checker has more than 450 entries. The list formed the basis of a study examining the phenomenon.
Our Retraction Watch Database now contains more than 66,000 retractions. Researchers used the database for articles on topics including conflicts of interest, the afterlife of retracted articles, potential paper mill papers in cancer research, and many more.
A fun moment: The Retraction Watch Database made it into the Harper’s Index.
We’re thrilled by this growth and progress, all of which center on keeping individuals, institutions and publishers accountable to upholding the integrity of the research enterprise.
None of this would have been possible without you, our readers, who value and support our work. You can make a tax-deductible donation to keep us going.
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Here’s to another year of Retraction Watch!
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].