Retractions of a given year’s publications as a percentage of papers published in science and engineering. Retraction data from Retraction Watch Database, overall publication figures via U.S. NSF.
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.
Remember the paper that made the rounds on Twitter after readers discovered that the error bars in one of its figures were really just capital Ts?
Well, it’s now been retracted, with the notice citing “concerns about the article’s scientific reliability.”
Error bars are supposed to express the statistical uncertainty of a measurement depicted in a graph, but the ones in this paper appeared to be capital letter Ts pasted on for looks.
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.”
The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.
Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.
Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:
The authors of a 2021 paper on a method of male enhancement have been forced to retract the paper after losing a legal battle over the technology.
At the heart (er, groin?) of the matter is a dispute over the ownership of a penile implant. According to court documents, James Elist, a urologist in Beverly Hills, Calif., developed the device, which he commercialized as Penuma for men who want a bit more than nature provided.
Penuma received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2004, becoming the first such product to reach the market. (As Elist told GQ in 2016, the surgically-implanted devices come only in large sizes because “nobody wants a small.”)
Elist alleges in a lawsuit that in 2018, a urologist in Texas named Robert Cornell contacted him with questions about how to use the Penuma in practice – questions the California physician claims were really efforts at corporate espionage:
A paper about the potential influence of neurotransmitters on the development of sexual orientation and psychiatric disorders that caught flack on social media a year ago has now been retracted – so recently that the corresponding author said he didn’t know about the retraction until we asked him about it.
The notice said only that “some readers have raised concerns” about the article, which the journal was discussing the the authors, a group led by Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam.
A retired professor of education has lost three papers – which he said he helped edit for a former student – after the publisher discovered manipulated peer review led to their acceptance.
Roger Shouse, an associate professor emeritus at Penn State College of Education, spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Sichuan University in China as a professor of public administration. While there, he helped several students write research articles in English, and advised one who listed him as a coauthor on three papers even though Shouse didn’t ask for authorship, he told us.
Those papers – on land use, climate vulnerability and disaster response among rural communities in Bangladesh – were retracted from the journal Land Use Policy this past August, after an investigation revealed the peer review process had been manipulated.
Shouse was listed as the last author, and researcher Md Nazirul Islam Sarker of Neijiang Normal University was the first author. A fourth paper retracted at the same time, with an identical retraction notice, listed Sarker as second author but did not include Shouse.
