Keep calm and be transparent: advice from scientists who retracted their papers

Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X Some researchers who retract their papers do so after others in the scientific community raise red flags to them about their work. Credit: EyeEm/Getty Early last month, evolutionary biologist Nicole King and postdoctoral fellow Jacob Steenwyk retracted their paper in the journal Science 1 . King was shaken when she realized that the paper — which attempted to use a new data-analysis approach to work out which animal lineages were the first to emerge on Earth — had serious technical errors. But the decision was still clear: “If you know you made a mistake, you’ve got to reverse it,” she says. Retractions caused by honest mistakes are extremely stressful, say researchers