Richard Van Noorden in Nature:
Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.
In 2023, as Nature reported, more than 10,000 retraction notices were issued (Nature 624, 479–481; 2023). Most of these were from Hindawi, a now-closed London subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, which found that Hindawi journals were affected by a blizzard of peer-review fraud and sham papers. (Wiley told Nature at the time that it had scaled up its research-integrity teams, put in place more rigorous processes to oversee manuscripts and removed “hundreds” of bad actors, including some guest editors, from its systems). During the past decade, the annual retraction rate — the proportion of published articles in a particular year that have been retracted — has trebled (although fewer retraction notices were issued overall in 2024 than in 2022 or 2023; see ‘A tide of retractions’). The proportion reached around 0.2% for papers published in 2022, and will rise as more articles are withdrawn (see ‘Rates on the rise’).
More here.
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