The Peer Review Problem Fueling a Surge in Scientific Retractions

Last month, Nature, perhaps the most admired scientific periodical in the world, retracted a 2024 article, “The Economic Commitment to Climate Change.“ The paper, by three scientists with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, had predicted that by 2100, climate change would reduce world economic output (GDP) by 62 percent, a shocking and widely reported claim. After two online criticisms, the authors conceded that the paper overstated the impact and understated the uncertainties of its prediction. The result: The paper was officially withdrawn from the scientific literature. How Many Retractions? There are a lot of retractions these days. According to Retraction Watch, which monitors scientific journals, “Nature has retracted 32 papers since 2020, including three in 2024. The retraction today [Dec. 3] marks the sixth for the journal in 2025.” Retraction Watch also says, somewhat more gently, “Science has retracted 20 papers since 2019, many for errors that weren’t necessarily misconduct.“ Those are the world’s leading scientific journals. However, thousands of scientific papers have been retracted over the past decade, far more than in the past. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, told an audience that in 2023 alone, there were 13,000 retractions! Many of them came from one company, Hindawi Publishing. This publisher of 250 journals was initially based in Cairo; the American publisher Wiley bought it in 2021. Wiley discovered severe problems and began retracting articles. Said Oransky: “Part of what’s happening is that there’s an entire industry now, one might say an illicit industry or at least a black market, of paper mills.” (Paper mills, the Wall Street Journal says, “charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.”) My Question Why didn’t someone in the peer-review process catch the errors before publication? In cases like the Nature climate change article, critics quickly registered their complaints. So why didn’t the reviewers see them earlier? One reason may be that reviewers are not paid. Can anonymous, unpaid reviewers who are busy with their own research (that is why they were selected!) devote the necessary time to decide if proper academic standards have been followed? Failure to catch errors is not the only problem of peer review. Peer review grew seriously after World War II, as universities and colleges began to judge faculty by their academic publishing record. It was “publish or perish,” as many universities shifted their emphasis from teaching to lucrative government research. Journals proliferated as a result, including irresponsible ones that were open to “paper mills.” And then there is scientific conformity. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley wrote in an online Martin Center symposium, “What is often forgotten in peer review are the extraordinary effects of groupthink in rear-ending the scientific process.” “Groupthink” is the idea that seasoned scientists are too entrenched in their fields to accept new ideas. Furthermore, “peers” have incentives to feather their nests. As psychology professor emeritus John Staddon observed, “No working scientist can afford to offend his peers, who may review his next paper (anonymously) or grant application (almost anonymously).” Richard Smith, former editor of the respected British Medical Journal, has summed up peer review this way: “Peer review is faith-based (not evidence-based), slow, wasteful, ineffective, largely a lottery, easily abused, prone to bias, doesn’t detect fraud and irrelevant. . . . Peer review in journals only persists because of huge vested interests.” To be fair, scientists have mixed opinions. While acknowledging “spectacular cases of research misconduct,” public policy professor Tim Birkland says that “these cases are also unrepresentative of the way most scholars conduct and assess their peers’ research.” Spontaneous Solutions? Just as peer review developed somewhat spontaneously as the need arose, spontaneous solutions to the problems are beginning to surface. Retraction Watch is monitoring retractions and commenting on the most significant ones. Another nonprofit group, called ERROR, pays people who identify serious flaws. “The more severe the error, the larger the payout,” says ERROR on its website. The fact that there are so many retractions is itself a sign that journals, too, are taking on more responsibility. Finally, for the groupthink problem, there is criticism and even humor. Nikolai Slavov is building a database of great discoveries that were rejected by leading journals. Two examples: Lynn Margulis’s 1967 foundational paper on eukaryotic cells was rejected “about fifteen times,” she wrote. In 1937, Nobel laureate Hans Krebs sent a short note to Nature flagging his discovery of what became the Krebs cycle. Nature rejected it because the journal already had too many such notes and recommended that Krebs send it elsewhere, which he did. Is there hope for peer review?