---
title: "Retraction in academic publishing"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retraction_in_academic_publishing"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:28:31.503137+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== 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 The paper was retracted on 17 June 2024 by the journal as two of the figures had been edited with image manipulation software.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.