Of the nearly 5,500 retractions we catalogued in 2022, and the thousands of cases we have reported on since launching our watchdog website Retraction Watch in 2010, the vast majority involve researchers at institutions without anywhere near Stanford and Harvard's pedigrees.
The number of retractions each year reflects about a tenth of a percent of the papers published in a given year - in other words, one in 1,000.
The figure has grown significantly from about 40 retractions in 2000, far outpacing growth in the annual volume of papers published.
Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first, sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies, and, second, major publishers' recognition that their business models have made them susceptible to paper mills - scientific chop shops that sell everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to publish lest they perish.
The truth is that the number of retractions in 2022 - 5,500 - is almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists.
The lengths to which scientists go to fight allegations of fraud is part of the reason the rate of retraction is lower than it should be.
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