More than 10,000 Research Papers Retracted in 2023, a New Record

There has been a rise of “paper mills”, which are businesses dedicated to pumping out fake or low-quality research for a fee, often to help researchers boost their portfolio of published material.

The number of scientific research papers that were retracted in 2023 exploded to more than 10,000, far surpassing previous records. For context, in 2022, about 5,500 papers were retracted. The magnitude of the increase was reported by Nature.

The bulk of retracted papers were published in special issues, which are frequently overseen by guest editors and which “have become notorious for being exploited by scammers to rapidly publish low-quality or sham papers,” according to Nature.

The proliferation of fake and shoddy research is a growing problem for the scientific community, which has become associated with a “publish or perish” paradigm. There has been a rise of “paper mills”, which are businesses dedicated to pumping out fake or low-quality research for a fee, often to help researchers boost their portfolio of published material. Recent estimates have put the percentage of papers submitted for publication by paper mills at anywhere from 2% to 20%.

Nature found that over the past two …