From Star Trek to ivermectin, we look back on some of the most notable about-faces in publishing this year.

Since the start of the pandemic, journals have retracted more than 200 COVID-19–related papers and counting, most of them in 2021. But such papers represent only about 5 percent of the more than 3,000 retractions we’ve indexed this year in the Retraction Watch Database. In what has become an annual tradition, here we present the top retraction stories of the year.

1Like a lot of people, Victor Grech, a pediatric heart specialist in Malta, really likes Star Trek. The problem is that Grech was able to turn an Elsevier journal called Early Human Development into something of a scientific fanzine, publishing dozens of articles for the periodical that were in a galaxy far, far outside the scope of its editorial interests. The publisher learned about the problematic papers in late 2020 from Hampton Gaddy, an undergrad at the University of Oxford in the UK. Grech’s articles covered topics such as the role of nurses in Star Trek, the banality of evil in Star Trek, and the portrayal of doctors in, you guessed it, Star Trek. Grech eventually lost more than two dozen papers to retraction.

See “When Researchers Sound the Alarm on Problematic Papers”

2In 2015, officials at the University of Colorado Denver concluded that one of its former faculty members, Hari Koul, needed to correct or retract nine papers over concerns about problematic images in the articles. But six years later, most of those articles remained intact—and many of the journals involved said they’d never heard of the investigation. After Retraction Watch reported on the delay, journals pulled three articles by Koul, who had left Denver for Louisiana State University Health Science Center (LSU HSC) in Shreveport and eventually ended up at LSU HSC New Orleans. Then, after local media reported on other allegations Retraction Watch had mentioned, LSU HSC New Orleans said it was investigating, and Koul stepped down from his post as department chair.