Retraction Watch
Retraction Watch is a New York-based science news service that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on research integrity. Launched in August 2010 by science journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, it began as a blog covering a subject the scientific press largely ignored — what happens when published research is withdrawn — and grew to operate the Retraction Watch Database, the most comprehensive catalogue of retracted papers in existence. It is a project of The Center for Scientific Integrity, a United States 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation, and its reporting and data are used by researchers, publishers, librarians, funders and news organisations worldwide.
Founding in 2010
Retraction Watch launched in August 2010. Ivan Oransky, a physician and medical journalist, was then executive editor of Reuters Health, having previously held senior editorial roles at The Scientist and Scientific American. Adam Marcus was managing editor of Anesthesiology News and later edited Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News. Earlier in 2010 Oransky had started a companion blog, Embargo Watch, examining the embargo system under which journals distribute papers to journalists ahead of publication.
The founders' stated motivation was transparency. Retractions, they observed, were generally not announced; the reasons for them were often not publicised; and researchers or members of the public unaware of a retraction could make decisions based on invalid results. Oransky cited the example of a paper reporting a potential drug role against some breast cancers whose later retraction went unreported by outlets that had covered the original finding, while a company had been established on the basis of the retracted conclusions. Retraction Watch set out to make the correction of the scientific record visible, and to treat retractions as a window into scientific fraud, error and the self-correcting mechanisms of science.
Editorial Focus and Reporting
The service publishes daily reporting on individual retractions: which journal withdrew a paper, what the authors and institutions said, what investigations found, and what the case reveals about peer review, publishing practice and research culture. Its coverage extends beyond retractions narrowly defined to corrections, expressions of concern, paper mills, image manipulation, plagiarism, authorship disputes and the policies of journals and universities. During the COVID-19 pandemic it maintained a separate list of retracted and withdrawn articles related to the pandemic, which became a reference for reporters covering contested COVID research.
The tone and method are journalistic rather than academic. Stories are reported by contacting authors, editors and institutions, documents are quoted and linked, and subjects are given the opportunity to respond. That approach made Retraction Watch a source other news organisations cite and follow: national newspapers, broadcasters and science magazines regularly pick up its findings or quote its editors on research misconduct.
The Retraction Watch Database
The service's largest project is the Retraction Watch Database, officially launched on 25 October 2018 with more than 18,000 retracted papers and conference items dating back to the 1970s. The journal Science partnered with Retraction Watch to analyse the catalogue at launch. The database records for each item the reason for retraction — using a taxonomy the team developed that distinguishes fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, honest error and the euphemisms journals sometimes use for misconduct — along with the paper's subject, country, journal and dates.
The catalogue continued to grow, passing 30,000 retractions by 2023, and analyses drawn from it found that the number of retractions per year had risen from fewer than 100 annually before 2000 to around 1,000 a year by the mid-2010s, while the rate per journal remained comparatively steady — evidence, specialists argued, that editorial policing had improved rather than that science had suddenly become less reliable. The database became the most extensive source of retraction data in existence, ahead of general indexes such as PubMed, and researchers have used it in dozens of studies of how retracted work continues to be cited.
The Center for Scientific Integrity and Funding
Retraction Watch's parent is The Center for Scientific Integrity, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote transparency and integrity in science and scientific publishing and to disseminate best practices. The journalism began as a volunteer-scale operation — it was years before the project had even an intern — and its expansion was funded philanthropically. In 2014 and 2015 three foundations, the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures) and the Helmsley Trust, supported both the journalism and the construction of the database, and funded a strategic plan for sustainability.
For a period the database was licensed to organisations that built it into research tools, on the principle that publishers, institutions and software firms should help sustain a resource they used commercially. In September 2023 Retraction Watch announced that the database would become completely open, under a sustainability arrangement centred on Crossref, the scholarly metadata agency, which began distributing the retraction data through its open infrastructure. The change made the full dataset freely available to anyone building tools to flag retracted research.
People
Oransky and Marcus remained the service's public faces throughout its history. Oransky has taught medical journalism at New York University since 2002, served as president of the Association of Health Care Journalists from 2017 to 2021, held editorial leadership roles at MedPage Today and Medscape, and since 2020 has been editor-in-chief of The Transmitter, a neuroscience publication, while serving as distinguished journalist in residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Marcus continued in specialist medical publishing alongside his Retraction Watch work. A small staff and contributing writers support the daily reporting and the continuing curation of the database.
Geographic Scope and Users
Although based in New York, Retraction Watch covers retractions worldwide, since scientific publishing is international and a retraction in any major journal affects researchers everywhere. Its users are correspondingly global: journal editors checking submissions, librarians maintaining collections, researchers verifying citations, integrity officers at universities and publishers, and journalists in many countries who use its database and reporting as source material. The database's integration into Crossref's services extended that reach into the standard infrastructure of scholarly communication.
Digital Presence
Retraction Watch publishes at retractionwatch.com, where its reporting appears as a continuously updated blog and the database is available for searching. Its stories are distributed further through social media, newsletters, republication and citation by other outlets, and its data is accessible through Crossref's API and services, which handle billions of metadata queries monthly. For many working scientists, an encounter with Retraction Watch data now happens indirectly, through a warning in a reference manager or publisher platform that a cited paper has been retracted.
Recognition
Retraction Watch won the 2024 Council of Science Editors Award for Meritorious Achievement, recognising its contribution to scientific publishing. Its founders' 2011 commentary in Nature, arguing that peer review continues long after publication, is frequently cited in discussions of post-publication review. More than fifty studies had cited Retraction Watch by early 2021 in research on the impact of retracted papers, a figure that has continued to grow.
Significance
Retraction Watch changed how the scientific community and the press treat the correction of the literature. Before 2010, retractions were obscure notices read mainly by specialists; Retraction Watch made them news, built the definitive public record of them, and supplied the data that publishers, funders and software companies now use to prevent retracted findings from propagating. As a small nonprofit news service whose database became part of the world's scholarly infrastructure, it is one of the clearest examples of journalism producing a permanent public resource — and its work remains a standing reminder that the credibility of science depends on how visibly it corrects itself.
