---
title: "Retraction in academic publishing"
chunk: 4/4
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 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 96032 COVID-19 patients, that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine increase the chance of patients dying in hospital, and the chance of ventricular arrhythmia. Medical researchers and newspapers expressed suspicions about the validity of the data, provided by Surgisphere, a company founded by one of the authors of the study. The article was formally retracted by 4 June 2020, on request by the lead author Mandeep Mehra.

=== Retraction over public relations issues ===
2016 On 4 March 2016, an article in PLOS ONE about the functioning of the human hand was retracted due to outrage on social media over a reference to "Creator" in the paper, a controversy dubbed CreatorGate.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 ==
Fabrication (science)
Post-publication peer review
Scientific misconduct
Sokal affair
Erratum
Research Integrity Risk Index
Correction (newspaper)

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Lesk, Michael (2015). "How many scientific papers are not original?". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (1): 6–7. Bibcode:2015PNAS..112....6L. doi:10.1073/pnas.1422282112. PMC 4291619. PMID 25538304.
Nag, S.N., Roy, A. and Sudhier, K.G. (2025), "Global perspectives on retracted papers in artificial intelligence and machine learning: a bibliometric study", Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-09-2024-0582