It’s been a record-setting year in terms of how many research articles have had to be retracted from scientific journals for being wrong in one way or another.
As Nature reports:
The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud.
Good news if it means the scientific record is being cleaned up, bad news if it were to mean that the rates of fraud and serious errors are increasing.
To be fair, an absolutely mind-boggling number of papers get published each year these days. Those 10k papers are only equivalent to around 0.2% of papers that were published this year.
8000 of the papers were all from the same publishing house, Hindawi, an unwelcoming $35-40 million surprise for its recent owners, Wiley.