A recent study has found that over half of the retracted academic papers from the top ten global academic publishers come from institutions in China.
According to a report by Chemistry World, a renowned chemistry news magazine published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom, the study analyzed 46,000 retracted papers recorded in the Retraction Watch Database from 1997 to 2026.
Among the 46,000 retracted papers, 29,867 were identified as coming from Chinese institutions, with over 91% lacking international co-authors. Interestingly, while Chinese researchers accounted for only 16.5% of global paper output during the same period, they made up over 52% of the retracted papers.
Following China, institutions in India, the United States, and Saudi Arabia accounted for 7.25%, 5.72%, and 2.83% of the total retracted papers, respectively.
The study, which was published last month on the preprint platform arXiv, has not yet undergone peer review.
Among the top ten academic publishers, Hindawi’s journals accounted for nearly a quarter of the total retracted papers in the database, with a retraction rate of around 320 papers per 10,000.
In 2021, John Wiley & Sons, a publishing industry giant, acquired approximately 200 journals under Hindawi but later abandoned the brand due to significant financial losses.
Following Hindawi, IOS Press had a retraction rate of 284 papers per 10,000.
In terms of the absolute number of retractions, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ranked second with 10,094 retractions, followed by Springer Nature with 7,534 retractions.
The majority of retractions from the IEEE were due to academic misconduct, while the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) primarily had retractions related to peer review manipulation or sabotage. Elsevier, Wiley, and IOS Press commonly retracted papers due to third-party interventions, which often indicated the involvement of paper mills producing meaningless or plagiarized research and selling authorship positions illegally.
The sole author of the study is Jonas Oppenlaender, a computer scientist at the University of Oulu in Finland.
Jodi Schneider, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the United States, noted that retractions by publishers are often not transparent enough, lacking clear explanations due to legal considerations.
She pointed out that Chinese papers are heavily retracted because the career advancement of many Chinese researchers is linked to the quantity of papers published. For example, hospitals in China have previously required doctors to publish a certain number of papers to be eligible for promotion. Although China has introduced a new physician evaluation policy in 2023, the number of retracted papers has not decreased.
Schneider emphasized that the current number of retractions is still insufficient and called for making retractions easier. She warned against automatically attributing all retractions to academic misconduct, as it may make researchers less likely to retract papers due to honest mistakes.
Malte Elson, a psychologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, stated that the actual number of fraudulent and plagiarized papers is likely much higher than what the retraction figures indicate.