Retraction for error •
2025 - A controversial paper claiming that the ancient village of Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea was destroyed by a cosmic airburst was retracted by the journal because the evidence did not support the conclusions; the authors maintained their position, and intended to republish the original article with new data. •
2013 - Study on the
Mediterranean diet published in
New England Journal of Medicine and widely covered by media was retracted due to unreported non-random assignments. This was part of a larger effort by anesthesiologist
John Carlisle to verify proper randomization in thousands of studies; he found problems in about 2% of those analyzed. •
2012 -
Séralini affair - Article suggesting reported an increase in
tumors among rats fed
genetically modified corn and the herbicide
RoundUp retracted due to criticism of experimental design. According to the editor of the journal, a "more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size". •
2003 - A study on the relationship between use of the
drug ecstasy and
dopaminergic neurotoxicity in primates published in
Science was retracted, due to
methamphetamine unintentionally being used in the experiment instead of ecstasy. See
Retracted article on neurotoxicity of ecstasy.
Retraction for fraud or misconduct •
2025 An article written by Aidan Toner-Rodgers, a doctoral student of economics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), intended to be published in
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, claimed that
artificial intelligence had been shown to massively improve efficiency at an unnamed
materials science lab. Despite not having been peer-reviewed, the paper, available through
ArXiv, enjoyed favourable coverage from outlets such as
The Wall Street Journal,
The Atlantic, and
Nature. In addition, it was praised by MIT economists
Daron Acemoglu and
David Autor, the former of whom had been co-awarded the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2024. The economists were then contacted in January 2025 by a computer scientist with experience in material science, who had disputed the legitimacy of the data, which was followed by an internal review conducted at MIT in early February; the review concluded that the paper was fraudulent, with Toner-Rodgers being expelled from the school. MIT requested that the paper be removed from arXiv. A press release from
MIT's economics department issued on 16 May 2025 stated that they "[had] no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and [had] no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper," without specifying details. Ben Shindel in his Substack "The BS Detector" speculated that the materials science company mentioned in the paper did not exist as it was implausible that they would provide such a large amount of data to an economics student, in addition to pointing out several instances where the
p-values seemed to be unrealistically low. Shindel further doubted Toner-Rodgers's application of a single complex method to analyze the unique qualities of vastly different materials, as well as describing as a "smoking gun" that one of his graphs "looks eerily similar" to one from a 2020 paper on drug analysis. •
2024 A 2002 article published by
Nature, written by
Catherine Verfaillie and multiple co-authors, purportedly found that adult bone marrow cells could be used as an alternative to
embryonic stem cells. The paper was retracted on 17 June 2024 by the journal as two of the figures had been edited with image manipulation software. Suspicions regarding the paper had been shared since 2006, when several research groups failed to replicate the findings presented; by 2009, two of Verfaillie's other papers had also been retracted due to image manipulation. As of 2025, the article is the most-cited article to have been retracted, with 4,482 citations having been made to the research before it was retracted. •
2021 An article studying the open-source community by Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu at the
University of Minnesota was withdrawn after the
Linux Foundation discovered that the researchers had submitted patches for the
Linux kernel with intentional bugs and without obtaining appropriate consent. •
2020 On 8 January 2020, Russian journals retracted more than 800 articles after a large-scale investigation conducted by the
Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) following claims of unethical publications. •
2019 On 11 April 2019, two articles on DNA damage by
Abderrahmane Kaidi of the
University of Bristol, one published in
Science in 2010 and another in
Nature in 2013, were retracted following evidence of data fabrication. •
2018 Five articles in the field of
consumer behavior and
marketing research by
Brian Wansink at
Cornell University came under scrutiny after peers pointed out inconsistencies in the data. Wansink had written a blog post about asking a graduate student to "salvage" conclusions. Cornell University launched an investigation, which determined in 2018 that Wansink had committed academic misconduct; he resigned. Eighteen of Wansink's research papers were later also retracted as similar issues were found in other publications. •
2014 An article by
Haruko Obokata et al. on
STAP cells, a method of inducing a cell to become a stem cell, was proven to be falsified. Originally published in
Nature, it was retracted later that year. It generated much controversy, and after an institutional investigation, one of the authors committed suicide. •
2011 Eight journal articles authored by
Duke University cancer researcher
Anil Potti and others, which describe genomic signatures of cancer prognosis and predictors of response to cancer treatment, were retracted in 2011 and 2012. The retraction notices generally state that the results of the analyses described in the articles could not be reproduced. In November 2015, the
Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. •
2010 A 1998 paper by
Andrew Wakefield proposing that the MMR vaccine might cause autism, which was responsible for the
MMR vaccine controversy, was retracted because "the claims in the original paper that children were 'consecutively referred' and that investigations were 'approved' by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false." •
2009 Numerous papers written by
Scott Reuben from 1996 to 2009 were retracted after it was discovered he never actually conducted any of the trials he claimed to have run. •
2007 Retraction of several articles written by social psychologist
Jennifer Lerner and colleagues from journals including
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and
Biological Psychiatry. •
2006 Retraction of
Patient-specific embryonic stem cells derived from human SCNT blastocysts, written by
Hwang Woo-Suk. Fabrications in the field of stem cell research led to 'indictment on embezzlement and bioethics law violations linked to faked stem cell research'. •
2003 Numerous articles with questionable data from physicist
Jan Hendrik Schön were retracted from many journals, including both
Science and
Nature. •
2002 Retraction of announced discovery of elements 116 and 118. See
Livermorium,
Victor Ninov. •
1991 Thereza Imanishi-Kari, who worked with
David Baltimore, published a 1986 article in the journal
Cell on immunology, which showed unexpected results on how the immune system rearranges its genes to produce antibodies against antigens it encounters for the first time. Margot O'Toole, a postdoctoral researcher for Imanishi-Kari, claimed that she could not reproduce Imanishi-Kari's results and alleged that Imanishi-Kari had fabricated the data. After a major investigation, the paper was retracted when the
National Institutes of Health concluded that data in the 1986 Imanishi-Kari article had been falsified. Five years later, in 1996, an expert panel appointed by the federal government found no evidence of scientific fraud and cleared Imanishi-Kari of misconduct, but the paper was not reinstated. •
1982 John Darsee fabricated results in the Cardiac Research Laboratory of
Eugene Braunwald at Harvard in the early 1980s. He was initially thought to be brilliant by his boss, but was caught out by fellow researchers at the laboratory.
Retraction for ethical violations •
2019 An article by
Wendy Rogers (
Macquarie University, Australia) and colleagues on
BMJ Open called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on
organ transplantation, due to concerns that the organs had been obtained unethically from Chinese prisoners. Rogers said the journals, researchers and clinicians who used these studies were complicit in these methods of
organ trafficking. According to the study, the transplant research community had failed to live up to ethical standards, continuing to publish articles based on use of organs from death row inmates. In 2019,
PLOS ONE retracted 21 articles related to this incident. •
2017 The journal
Liver International retracted a Chinese study of
liver transplantation because 564 livers grafted in the course of the research over 4 years could not be traced. The experts pointed out that it was implausible a hospital could have so many freely donated livers for transplantation, given the small number of donors in China at the time.
Retraction over data provenance •
2020 On 22 May 2020, during the
COVID-19 pandemic, an article was published in
The Lancet which claimed to find evidence, based on a database of COVID-19 patients, that
hydroxychloroquine and
chloroquine increase the chance of patients dying in hospital, and the chance of
ventricular arrhythmia. was retracted due to outrage on
social media over a reference to "Creator" in the paper, a controversy dubbed
CreatorGate. •
1896 Jose Rizal was said to have issued a letter of retraction regarding his novels and other published articles against the Roman Catholic Church, see
José Rizal: Retraction controversy. == See also ==