Characteristics and trends of retracted publications in gynecologic oncology

Retractions in scientific publishing have increased sharply in the past 2 decades, with more than 10,000 articles withdrawn globally in 2023. Despite this growth, the scope, causes, and temporal patterns of retractions within gynecologic oncology have not been systematically characterized. Understanding these patterns is essential to safeguard research integrity and maintain confidence in the oncologic evidence base.

We conducted a descriptive observational analysis of retracted gynecologic oncology publications using the Retraction Watch Database from its inception and publication outputs indexed in Web of Science between 1989 and 2024. Retracted articles were identified across all gynecologic oncology disease sites, and bibliometric characteristics, study type, country of origin, publisher, citation impact, time to retraction, and stated reasons for retraction were analyzed.

We identified 220 retracted gynecologic-oncology articles published across 83 journals in all specialties. These retracted publications were cited 4955 times, with median citations per retraction of 6 (range; 0-1855). Ovarian (101, 45.9%), cervical (76, 34.5%), and endometrial cancer (34, 15.5%) were the most represented disease sites, and 126 (57.3%) of retracted articles were basic-science studies. Median time to retraction was 1 year (range; 0-14). Data concerns accounted for the majority of withdrawals (118, 53.6%), followed by compromised peer review (35, 15.9%), image duplication (15, 6.8%), and authorship or ethics issues (15, 6.8%). China accounted for the largest proportion of identified retractions (80.9%), followed distantly by the United States (4.1%) and Japan (2.7%). Two publishers accounted for 47.0% (n = 104) of retractions. When adjusted for overall publication volume (n = 265,102 gynecologic oncology articles), the global rate of retractions rose markedly from 0.7 per 1000 publications in 2000 to 10.1 per 1000 publications in 2024.

These findings suggest opportunities to strengthen editorial and institutional safeguards, robust research-integrity training, and systematic implementation of fraud-detection tools to protect the quality of gynecologic-oncology literature.