Author: Ivan Oransky

In 2002, journals retracted 119 papers from the scientific literature. 

What a difference two decades make. 

On several occasions this year, publishers announced they were retracting several times that number, all at once. (For some of the stories among 2022’s retractions that captured the most attention, see our 10th annual roundup for The Scientist.)

This year’s 4,600-plus retractions bring the total in the Retraction Watch Database to more than 37,000 at the time of this writing. 

Dear Retraction Watch readers, we have some exciting news to share.

The WoodNext Foundation has awarded The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent 501(c)3 nonprofit, a two-year $250,000 grant that will allow us to add another editor. 

The WoodNext Foundation is the philanthropy of tech innovator and Roku CEO/founder Anthony Wood and his wife Susan, and its mission is “to advance human progress and remove obstacles to a fulfilling life.”

With the grant, we have hired Frederik Joelving, an experienced investigative reporter focused on health and science, and added to our freelance budget. Joelving, who is based in Copenhagen, will start on January 3. His award-winning work has had a big impact, including a ban by the Indian government on lucrative but troubling sales practices by drugmakers.

What retractions grabbed the most attention in 2022?

As we’ve now done for a decade, we took a look through the year’s stories about retractions for our friends at The Scientist and gathered the ten that seemed to most capture the limelight. As we write there, the cases ranged from “typo-laden code in psychedelics research to paper mills and plagiarism.”

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Sometime this week or early next week, we will publish our 6,000th post. That means we’ve averaged nearly 500 per year since we launched a bit more than 12 years ago.

Wow.

And yet that’s not nearly all we do here at Retraction Watch. We — and by that I mean our researcher Alison Abritis and a small but very merry band of freelancers — maintain the most comprehensive database of retractions available. That database, which at last count contains more than 37,000 retractions, is now used by three leading reference managers — EndNote, Papers, and Zotero — to power their retraction alerts, and has been the basis of scores of scholarly papers.