Salon today retracted a controversial 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about an alleged link between autism and thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccines. As Salon explains in their retraction notice, the online magazine had co-published the piece with Rolling Stone. The notice reads, in part:
A preprint server has withdrawn a study that suggested children vaccinated in the second month of life are more likely to die soon after when compared to those who did not receive the vaccinations. The paper, posted at Preprints.org last December, was written by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker of Children’s Health Defense, a New … Continue reading Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines
We always enjoy our annual review of the year at Retraction Watch, and 2025 is no exception. But we’re more excited about what lies ahead than what we already accomplished. We’re on track for our second-highest year for pageviews — 6.6 million. This year we brought you more than 300 posts. Among our most-read stories … Continue reading Cheers to 2025: In which Retraction Watch turned 15, and The Center For Scientific Integrity really became a center
Starting around 2023, a curious trend took hold in papers on drug safety monitoring. The number of articles published on an individual drug and its link to specific adverse events went from a steady increase to a huge spike. The data source in most of those articles was largely the same: The FDA Adverse Events … Continue reading Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature
Once upon a time, a long time ago, two science journalists had an idea for a blog about retractions. And on Aug. 3, 2010, Retraction Watch launched, detailing in the first post why retractions matter. And now, 15 years and 6,700 posts later, that work seems more important than ever. We are gratified every day … Continue reading Happy 15th anniversary, Retraction Watch
Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up? If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced, published by Springer Nature in April. Based on a tip from a reader, we checked 18 of the 46 citations … Continue reading Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations
Brown University physician-scientist Wafik El-Deiry has been a longtime critic of the post-publication forum PubPeer, where 75 of his papers have been flagged. For example, in an April post on X, formerly Twitter, he stated, “It is not good that PubPeer has been weaponized and has become tyrannical.” In July 2024, he referred to the … Continue reading Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’
President Trump recently issued an executive order calling for improvement in the reproducibility of scientific research and asking federal agencies to propose how they will make that happen. I imagine that the National Institutes of Health’s response will include replication studies, in which NIH would fund attempts to repeat published experiments from the ground up, … Continue reading Guest post: NIH-funded replication studies are not the answer to the reproducibility crisis in pre-clinical research
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 59,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately … Continue reading Weekend reads: MAHA report cites nonexistent studies; RFK Jr. threatens publishing access; can ‘zombie papers’ be killed?
When it comes to conversations about vaccines and autism, we always have plenty to write about. And the latest news that the Trump administration has tapped David Geier for a study on possible links between immunizations and autism, first reported by the Washington Post, is no exception. Geier has a long history of promoting the … Continue reading Why RFK Jr.’s pick for a vaccine-autism review may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers