Two days before the end of 2021, administrators at Jining First People’s Hospital in Shandong, China, issued a highly unusual report. The hospital announced that it had disciplined some 35 researchers who had been linked to fraud in publications, such as fabricating data.

This surge can now be seen in a first-of-its-kind analysis of institutional retraction rates around the globe over the past decade, for which Nature’s news team used figures supplied by three private research-integrity and analytics firms. Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted – more than 100 papers.

Many other Chinese hospitals are retraction hotspots. But universities and institutes in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Ethiopia feature in the data as well. Retractions can be for honest mistakes and administrative errors, but evidence suggests the majority of cases in these data are related to misconduct.

Source https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00455-y

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