Retracted research, by the numbers

The journal has formally withdrawn it from the scientific record, usually after finding fabricated data, plagiarism, unreliable results, or compromised peer review. A retracted paper should not be cited as evidence, and examiners and journals actively check reference lists for them.

They are computed from the research papers indexed in the CiteDash catalog, with retraction status drawn from the open scholarly catalogs (OpenAlex, which incorporates Crossref and Retraction Watch data). They describe this catalog, not the entire scholarly record, so absolute counts will differ from databases with different coverage.

Retraction is slow: investigations, institutional reviews, and journal processes routinely take years. A paper published recently has had little time to be caught, so recent years' counts keep rising for a decade or more. A small number for last year says nothing about how many of its papers will eventually be retracted.

No, and the reverse is also false. Large journals publish more of everything, including papers later retracted, and a high count can reflect a journal that actively investigates and cleans up its record. Equally, a journal missing from this page is not certified clean: it may simply have too few papers in our catalog to report on responsibly.

Paste any DOI into the free retraction checker, or paste a whole reference list into the bibliography checker to screen every entry at once. Inside CiteDash, every paper is screened automatically and continuously before it can enter a bibliography.