Trust in science needs researchers, journals and institutions to correct the scientific record quickly and transparently when errors are found.
Authors and institutions need to acknowledge problems with published studies when they are found.Credit: Getty
Scientists rightly want to be and should be credited for discoveries and inventions. But in addition to receiving credit, scientific authorship also means being accountable if issues arise. It is a matter of responsibility and transparency.
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Authors need to acknowledge errors in their studies that have come to light after publication, for instance, or if their published findings could not be verified subsequently. Institutions and journals have clear responsibilities, too, to correct the publication record when needed. As we have argued previously, this process works best when all parties cooperate.
The process of correcting the scientific record often raises difficult questions, particularly when it comes to retractions. For example, what are the respective roles of institutions and journals in the process of retractions? How should authors distribute, and accept, responsibility when a study has been retracted if data have been manipulated or if there are concerns that they might have been manipulated?
Updated guidelines
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom that advises on standards in scholarly publishing, has been considering these questions and updated its guidelines for retractions in August 2025 (see go.nature.com/496corh). The new guidelines reiterate the previous guidance in highlighting that “authorship requires joint responsibility for the integrity of the reported research”.
They also restate that “if retraction is due to the actions of some but not all of the authors of a publication, the notice of retraction should state this if possible”. But the updated guidance now also states: “This approach would only be appropriate if an institutional investigation concluded that a specific author or authors were responsible for the errors or actions. The retraction notice should reference the institutional investigation.”
Nature has followed these updated principles for a study on lung cancer immunotherapy that the authors have now retracted formally (K. W. Ng et al. Nature 616, 563–573 (2023); retraction https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10104-7; 2026).
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