The Retraction Economy

More papers were retracted in 2023 than in any year on record. This is not a slow drift. It is a step change, and the reasons behind it are more specific, and more relevant to you personally, than most people realize.

63,000+

The instinct is to read that number as evidence that science is getting worse. The researchers who track this closely mostly disagree. The more likely explanation is that detection has improved dramatically, journals are looking harder, and a specific new category of organized fraud has scaled up fast enough to move the entire global number. Understanding which one it is matters, because only one of them is actually a threat to your own work.

Here is where retractions are actually coming from.

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. Fake peer review is not a researcher cutting a corner. It is an organized operation, often called a paper mill, that manufactures fraudulent manuscripts at scale, submits them with fabricated or compromised reviewer contacts, and sells authorship slots to researchers under pressure to publish. It is industrial, and it is growing faster than almost any other category of misconduct.

The same publish or perish pressure that rewards genuine, sustained volume is exactly what paper mills are built to exploit. They sell the appearance of productivity to people who have been told, correctly, that productivity is what their career depends on.

Oncology has the highest retraction volume of any medical specialty, followed by cardiovascular medicine. If you work in a high output, high funding, high competition field, and cardiac surgery research checks every one of those boxes, you are working in exactly the environment where this pressure is most concentrated.

None of this means you are at meaningful risk of committing fraud. It means you are at real risk of something quieter and more common: becoming an unwitting co-author on a paper compromised by someone else's shortcut, a collaborator who used a data broker you did not vet, or a manuscript service that turned out to be a paper mill in different packaging. Retraction does not distinguish between the person who fabricated the data and the co-author who trusted them.

The volume and consistency that build a real career and the shortcuts that paper mills sell can look similar from the outside. The difference is entirely in whether you can trace every claim back to a source you personally verified. If you want a second check on a collaboration or a manuscript service before you commit your name to it, that is a reasonable thing to think through carefully rather than quickly. AskDimitri can help you work through it.

Think it through before you commit →

A retraction does not ask whether you meant it. It only asks whether your name is on the paper. That is reason enough to look a little more carefully at the next name that asks to be added to yours.

Editor's note: in September 2026 the figures in this letter were checked against the sources listed below, and the text was corrected where the letter as sent differed from them.