Since the start of the pandemic, journals have retracted more than 200 COVID-19–related papers and counting, most of them in 2021. But such papers represent only about 5 percent of the more than 3,000 retractions we’ve indexed this year in the Retraction Watch Database. In what has become an annual tradition, here we present the top retraction stories of the year.
1Like a lot of people, Victor Grech, a pediatric heart specialist in Malta, really likes Star Trek. The problem is that Grech was able to turn an Elsevier journal called Early Human Development into something of a scientific fanzine, publishing dozens of articles for the periodical that were in a galaxy far, far outside the scope of its editorial interests. The publisher learned about the problematic papers in late 2020 from Hampton Gaddy, an undergrad at the University of Oxford in the UK. Grech’s articles covered topics such as ...
