A leading environmental economics journal is looking into claims that a 2025 study linking national innovation to lower carbon emissions contains data that does not match its source, after an expert in the field requested the paper be retracted.
The article appeared in Ecological Economics, the journal for the International Society for Ecological Economics and published by Elsevier. The authors, three researchers at ESSCA School of Management in Lyon, claimed to draw on data from 229 countries between 2013 and 2020 and reported a negative relationship between a country’s “innovativeness” and its carbon dioxide emissions per capita. The paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
But three months after it was published, in October 2025, the journal began investigating anomalies in the dataset, although the authors maintain none of it was fabricated. In a letter to the journal’s editors requesting a retraction last October, seen by Retraction Watch, an academic with expertise in the field who reviewed the dataset said the paper had “serious data integrity concerns” and described a “clear case of research misconduct.”
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