Jonas Oppenlaender, author of a February 2026 preprint and researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, analyzed data from the Retraction Watch database covering the period from 1997 to early 2026 in order to identify the nine major publishers with the highest numbers of retractions.

According to his calculations, Elsevier had a retraction rate of 3.97 per 10,000 published articles. By comparison, the rate was 5.46 for SAGE, 6.21 for Wiley, 6.50 for Taylor & Francis, 9.06 for Springer Nature, 17.70 for IEEE, 26.82 for PLOS, and 283.77 for IOS Press. The highest retraction rate was recorded for Hindawi, with 320.02 retractions per 10,000 articles.

Of the 98 articles in the dataset that were reinstated after retraction, 86 had been published in Elsevier journals. Elsevier reinstated 1.3% of its retracted articles. Only Taylor & Francis came close to this figure, with a reinstatement rate of 0.4%.

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