Retraction Watch Staff

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

*Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).*

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.

Weekend reads: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

ORI announces 15-year debarment against former Rice University scientist
Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books
Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms
Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed
One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis.
Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Weekend reads: A retraction for top cancer researcher; paper mill ads paired to IEEE proceedings; about that study on ChatGPT and learning

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds
Researcher claims his case report was stolen by someone else at his hospital
Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study
NEJM retracts case study for AI-manipulated imagery

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Weekend reads: What paper mills charge for author slots; UK Biobank data breached; what researchers think of the future of science

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

10 years ago, Elisabeth Bik published a preprint heard around the world
Major pharmacology journals flag another 15 papers by scientist facing criminal probe
‘I asked him to stop’: Father adds daughter’s name to over 100 preprints without her permission
A response to: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere? Read the original guest post
Another retraction and two investigations for chemist
Journal goes dark after impersonating Eric Topol and others
Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

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Weekend reads: An alternative to the impact factor in China; the clinical trials of six ‘superretractors’; Retraction Watch goes to Capitol Hill

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Scientist who alleged COVID cover-up circulated a faked NIH email, agency says
BMJ retracts most of a special issue for ‘compromised’ peer review and ‘improbable device use’
‘Game-changer’ breast cancer study retracted as Indiana researcher out of his post
Retraction Watch testifies in Congressional hearing on scientific publishing. Coverage of the hearing in Nature and Inside Higher Ed.
45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’

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Retraction Watch testifies in Congressional hearing on scientific publishing

Retraction Watch managing editor Kate Travis (center) testified April 15 in a hearing before the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Other witnesses were Carl Maxwell (left) of the Association of American Publishers and Jason Owen-Smith (right) of the University of Michigan.

A hearing on Capitol Hill today explored issues in scientific publishing — and Retraction Watch had a seat at the table.

The Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology called the hearing to talk about open access, reproducibility, predatory journals, paper mills and the incentive structure in science. The wide remit meant the committee and witnesses touched on quite a few topics in 90 minutes.

Our testimony, delivered by managing editor Kate Travis, focused on the pitfalls of “publish or perish” and how an overreliance on metrics has incentivized shortcuts in research and publishing. “‘Publish or perish’ is what has allowed businesses like paper mills and predatory journals to flourish, and more recently is leading to an explosion of AI-generated papers flooding journals,” Travis told the subcommittee.

Weekend reads: LLMs ‘are not the problem’; Cash for peer review ‘doesn’t work,’ project finds; ‘Many Flaws, Few Retractions’ in vaping literature

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data
Publisher changes citation, registration policies following Retraction Watch investigation
A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’
Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders? Scientists “are divided over whether this centralized, confidential list would solve the problem or generate new ones,” Nature reports.
Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

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Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

*Public comment is invited through April 17, 2026.*

A Canadian panel is proposing several changes to its guidelines for responsible conduct of research, including a provision that effectively removes any statute of limitations on investigations into potential misconduct.

The proposed revisions, from the Canadian Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research (PRCR), are up for public comment until April 17 and have not been made official. The PRCR is an interdisciplinary review and advisory body to Canada’s three federal research funding agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?

*Mark Barnes (courtesy of Ropes and Gray LLC)*

In an editorial published today in Science, Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes call for greater transparency in investigations of scientific misconduct with an aim toward making sure prospective academic employers know of applicants’ past misdeeds. As we’ve reported, in the absence of transparency around findings of misconduct, some universities have discovered too late they hired someone who has turned out to be a serial offender.

Lauer, who served as Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health from 2015-2025, and Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions, propose a tracking system similar to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). That database logs adverse actions and malpractice payments as a way to inform decisions about individual physicians by hospitals. As Lauer and Barnes note, federal law “requires a hospital to query the NPDB whenever it is considering a new applicant for medical privileges, as well as to conduct repeat queries every 2 years to make sure information on staff is up to date.” We asked Barnes to elaborate on the ideas presented in the op-ed. (He notes he is speaking only for himself here.)

Retraction Watch: You write in your op-ed universities may avoid sharing personal information — presumably including results of misconduct investigations — for fear of legal claims of defamation or violations of privacy. Are those fears valid?

Weekend reads: Half of social science ‘doesn’t replicate’; ‘Scientific ghosts: Life after retraction’; multisensory learning paper retracted

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?
Jury to decide whether Duke retaliated against researcher who reported sexual harassment
BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’
Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage
Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’
Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

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