Ever since we broke the news about the issues with the now-retracted Science paper about changing people’s minds on gay marriage, we’ve been the subject of a lot of press coverage, which has in turn led a number of people to ask us: Who has the most retractions? Well, we’ve tried to answer that in … Continue reading Who has the most retractions? Introducing the Retraction Watch leaderboard
Who has the most retractions? Here’s our unofficial list (see notes on methodology), which we’ll update as more information comes to light: Joachim Boldt (220) See also: Editors-in-chief statement, our coverage Yoshitaka Fujii (172) See also: Final report of investigating committee, our reporting, additional coverage Hironobu Ueshima (124) See also: our coverage Yoshihiro Sato (122) … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Leaderboard
Nature, as we and others have noticed, has had what Paul Knoepfler referred to as a “torrent” of retractions in the past two years. That torrent — 13 research papers — has prompted a welcome and soul-searching editorial, as it did in 2010 when the journal had what it called an “unusually large number” of … Continue reading Nature, facing “considerable rise” in retractions, blames lawyers for opaque and delayed notices
A pair of engineering researchers has analyzed the work of a handful of prolific scientific fraudsters, and has concluded that science needs a “shame list” to deter future misconduct. The paper, “Analysis and Implications of Retraction Period and Coauthorship of Fraudulent Publications,” by Jong Yong Abdiel Foo and Xin Ji Alan Tan, of Ngee Ann … Continue reading Does science need a retraction “shame list?”
The University of Tokyo panel investigating the work of a former professor there, Shigeaki Kato, has recommended the retraction of 43 of his group’s articles, according to a report in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. If the papers are indeed retracted, Kato, who already has at least five articles subject to an expression of concern and … Continue reading Tokyo panel calls for retraction of 43 Kato papers
The title of this post is the title of a new study in PLOS ONE by three researchers whose names Retraction Watch readers may find familiar: Grant Steen, Arturo Casadevall, and Ferric Fang. Together and separately, they’ve examined retraction trends in a number of papers we’ve covered. Their new paper tries to answer a question … Continue reading “Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased?” New study tries to answer
Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that many of the people whose fraud we write about are men. Certainly, the top retraction earners — Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Naoki Mori, to name a few — all have a Y chromosome. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our sample size is representative. Now … Continue reading Are men more likely to commit scientific fraud?
We’ve learned a lot about retractions in 2012, from the fact that most retractions are due to misconduct to the effects they can have on funding. We’ve seen eyebrow-raising reasons for retractions, from a hack of Elsevier’s peer review system to a researcher peer reviewing his own papers, to massive fraud in psychology to a … Continue reading How many retractions were there in 2012? And, some shattered records
As we — and others — have written, retracted articles don’t necessarily creep off to some little island somewhere never to be heard from again. After all, the electronic versions of about a third of retracted papers aren’t marked as retracted. Sometimes, like Napoleon, those papers return from exile to wreak havoc: They get cited … Continue reading After retracted study’s cited, editors ask, “time to add scientific integrity to the downside of print on paper?”
We’ve had a few unofficial record-holders here at Retraction Watch. The current leader in the retraction column, for example, is Yoshitaka Fujii, who will likely retract 172 papers. He took that record from Joachim Boldt, with just shy of 90. Today, we’ll take a stab at another record, longest time between publication and retraction. The … Continue reading And the winner for longest time on record between publication and retraction is…