In 2015, cancer researcher Anil Potti – back then associated with Duke University in Durham, North Carolina – was found guilty of research misconduct by a US federal investigation led by the office for research integrity of the Department of health and human services. “The findings bring to a close one of the most egregious U.S. scientific misconduct cases in recent years” wrote Science magazine.

The episodes of misconduct listed by the office for research integrity included faking research data in research reports from six different NIH grants, swelling the number of patients involved, altering scan results and data sets, or reporting predictors and/or their validation by disregarding accepted scientific methodology so that false data were reported in eleven now-retracted papers, science journalist and watchdog of research integrity Ivan Oransky reported in his blog Retraction Watch, that he launched with friend and colleague Adam Marcus with no clear plan: “we had a lot of good stories” he says in an interview with CancerWorld in his office in New York.

Now, Retraction Watch is much more that a blog launched and updated as a past-time: it has become a freely available, comprehensive database including nearly 21,000 retractions, “compared to just over half that on sites like Scopus” Oransky says. “Nothing like this exists because no one has been cataloguing retractions so effectively”.

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