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Cost of Retracted Articles to the NIH: a Living Analysis

Sandoval-Lentisco, A.; Ioannidis, J. P. A.

2026-07-07 epidemiology
10.64898/2026.07.04.26357187 medRxiv
Show abstract

Retractions attract substantial attention and have become more frequent over time. Retractions reflect the self-correcting nature of science but also wasted resources. The Retraction Watch Database (RWD) includes over 60,000 records. We integrated RWD with NIH funding metadata (RePORTER system). As of July 2026, of the 6,081 U.S. affiliated retracted articles, 1,725 (28.4%) were linked to at least one NIH grant. With a mean attributed cost per retracted NIH-funded article of $255,087 in 2026 dollars, the attributed total cost of NIH-funded retracted research is $440 million in 2026 dollars. Grants associated with retracted papers for which the first or last author of the paper was the principal investigator were awarded $4.03 billion in 2026 dollars. NIH-funded articles take longer to be retracted (mean = 6.3 years) than other US-based articles, which may entail greater downstream implications. NIH funding of retracted authors decreased over the 3 years following retraction, particularly among authors with multiple retractions. We have developed a continuously updated dynamic dashboard (https://sandovallentisco.shinyapps.io/nih-retractions/) for the cost of retractions reflecting NIH-funded work.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
● 2444 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
19.3%
Similar papers in this journal
2
eLife
● 5828 papers in training set
Top 4%
15.7%
Similar papers in this journal
3
JAMA Network Open
● 130 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
8.2%
Similar papers in this journal
4
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
○ 31 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
6.5%
Similar papers in this journal
5
PLOS Biology
● 486 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
4.5%
Similar papers in this journal
50% of probability mass above
6
BMC Medicine
○ 176 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
4.2%
7
PLOS ONE
● 5266 papers in training set
Top 32%
4.2%
8
Science
● 477 papers in training set
Top 4%
2.5%
9
Scientific Reports
○ 3612 papers in training set
Top 40%
2.5%
10
Nature Human Behaviour
○ 95 papers in training set
Top 1%
2.0%
11
Science Advances
● 1243 papers in training set
Top 22%
1.5%
12
European Journal of Epidemiology
○ 43 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
1.4%
13
International Journal of Epidemiology
◐ 88 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.2%
14
Cell Genomics
○ 172 papers in training set
Top 4%
1.1%
15
Annals of Internal Medicine
● 28 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
1.1%
16
Nature Communications
○ 5641 papers in training set
Top 52%
1.1%
17
Aperture Neuro
● 20 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
0.9%
18
Rheumatology
◐ 24 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
0.9%
19
PeerJ
◐ 308 papers in training set
Top 10%
0.9%
20
Nature
○ 645 papers in training set
Top 11%
0.6%
21
Frontiers in Medicine
○ 120 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.6%
22
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
● 393 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.6%
23
PLOS Medicine
● 110 papers in training set
Top 3%
0.6%
24
BMJ Open
● 601 papers in training set
Top 13%
0.6%
25
Eurosurveillance
● 83 papers in training set
Top 1.0%
0.6%
26
Emerging Infectious Diseases
● 105 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.6%
27
Cell Reports Methods
○ 165 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.5%
28
Frontiers in Neurology
○ 102 papers in training set
Top 3%
0.5%
29
iScience
○ 1154 papers in training set
Top 44%
0.5%
30
American Journal of Epidemiology
◐ 67 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.5%

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.