Cost of Retracted Articles to the NIH: a Living Analysis

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.