Retracted Randomized Clinical Trials From Superretractors and Top-Cited Scientists With Multiple Retractions

Multiple retractions from the same author often uncover issues affecting their entire work, such as having systematically altered or fabricated data.

To evaluate the contribution of authors with the most retractions (ie, superretractors) and top-cited scientists with multiple retractions to the retracted randomized clinical trial (RCT) literature.

This retrospective cohort study linked an openly available cohort of retracted RCTs (VITALITY) to 3 lists of scientists: (1) superretractors, totaling most retractions in the Retraction Watch Leaderboard; (2) scientists in the top 100 000 or 2% of their subfield in terms of citations (ie, top-cited scientists) over their entire careers who accumulated 10 or more retractions not due to editor or publisher errors; and (3) top-cited scientists in the most recent year (ie, 2024) who accumulated 10 or more retractions not due to editor or publisher errors. The VITALITY cohort was updated up to November 2024. The 3 author lists were updated in August 2025.

The main outcomes were authorship and the characteristics of retracted RCTs (publication and retraction year, time between publication and retraction, number of citations).

A total of 30 superretractors, 163 career-long top-cited scientists with 10 or more retractions, and 174 recent-year top-cited scientists with 10 or more retractions were included; 1330 retracted RCTs were included. Overall, 6 superretractors (20%), representing anesthesiology as well as endocrinology and metabolism, coauthored 290 retracted RCTs (22%); 18 career-long top-cited scientists with at least 10 retractions, representing 10 fields, coauthored 327 trials (25%), 275 (84%) of which were also coauthored by a superretractor; 7 single-year top-cited scientists with at least 10 retractions coauthored 50 retracted RCTs (4%), all of which were also included in the list of articles authored by career-long top-cited scientists with at least 10 retractions. Articles with superretractor authors vs not were published earlier (median [IQR], 2000 [1997-2005] vs 2020 [2014-2022]); retracted earlier (median [IQR], 2013 [2012-2019] vs 2023 [2018.5-2023]); had a longer lag between publication and retraction (median [IQR], 5111 [3560-6820] days vs 482 [330-1119] days); and accrued more citations (median [IQR], 21 [12-42] vs 5 [1-19]). In multivariable regression models, only time to retraction (β = 0.02; P < .001) was significantly and positively associated with total citations. Results were similar when comparing retracted articles from top-cited scientists with at least 10 retractions vs other articles.

In this cohort study of 1330 retracted RCTs, a small number of influential authors, often coauthors and concentrated across few fields of medicine, accounted for a significant proportion of retracted clinical trials.