Author: Ivan Oransky

Like everyone else, it seems, we here at Retraction Watch are more than ready to put 2020 to bed. It was a bittersweet year to celebrate our tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’ve learned. But the work never stops, so as we’ve done every year since 2010, we’ll take a look at the most notable retractions of the last 12 months, and review some important milestones and events. 

Given that journals retracted more than 1,800 papers in 2020, we had plenty of stories from which to choose. However, leading the list would have to be the papers about the pandemic that were pulled for flaws ranging from problematic data to shaky science to absolute wackiness. Indeed, if Covid were an author, it would be fifth on our leaderboard, with 72 so far. We’re certain that’s not the high-water mark for Covid retractions given the haste with which scientists have churned out papers about the disease and the virus behind it.

The intersection of politics and science drew particular attention, such as this paper about race and police killings whose authors triggered an outcry from the right after they called for their work to be retracted. Some journals engaged in an exercise of cupboard cleaning, retracting papers offensive to minorities, women and other groups. As we argued in Wired, critics of this “purging” tended to miss the larger point: the papers deserved to be retracted not just because of their repellent content but because they were scientifically unsound. And best practices for retraction recommend that they not disappear down a “memory hole,” but that they remain online, but marked “RETRACTED.”

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of keeping our database of retractions up to date, we’ve been publishing a running list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted.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 steadily growing since the end of April, but yesterday the number jumped from 45 to 72, so we thought we’d walk through where the additional retractions came from.

Ten of the new retractions are from one publisher — Elsevier — and for one reason: Elsevier screwed up. How? Well, they published these ten papers twice. The error has nothing at all to do with the authors or the quality of the work, according to the notices. We’ve commented on this phenomenon before. 

In what has become an annual tradition, our friends at The Scientist asked us to round up what we thought were the biggest retractions of the last 12 months. Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by some of the 39 retractions we’ve seen of COVID-19 studies. But that’s not the whole list.

Head on over to see our picks.