// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Retractions of old papers are on the rise: when should bad science be culled?
Dyani Lewis is a freelance journalist in Melbourne, Australia.
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In August 1987, a scandal erupted over work on the world’s highest mountain range. John Talent, a palaeontologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, announced he had found numerous anomalies in research charting the geology of the Himalayas. All of the problems were in papers by Vishwa Jit Gupta, one of India’s most celebrated palaeontologists at the time.
More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record
Gupta was outraged. But further investigations over the following seven years revealed the scale and brazenness of his fraud. Littered through more than 450 publications were maps of collection sites that didn’t exist, plagiarized images and specimens stolen from collections that Gupta had visited. More than 100 experts had been duped into co-authoring descriptions of fossils Gupta claimed he had collected from specific Himalayan geological formations, but instead hailed from North America and Morocco.
“It destroyed the image of Indian science,” says retired geologist Ghulam Bhat, who completed his PhD on Himalayan geology in the same year that the allegations of fraud emerged.
Gupta died in 2022, and many geologists know to steer clear of his work. But awareness of the problem is fading, and none of Gupta’s papers have been retracted. When Nature contacted Bhat, who is now editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Geological Society of India (JGSI), he was unaware that Gupta’s papers were not marked as retracted. That’s despite the JGSI’s 1991 evaluation of 19 of Gupta’s papers that it published1, which concluded that “the fossil finds of V. J. Gupta are not reliable [...] the data is incomplete bordering on disinformation”.
Much of Gupta’s work is inaccessible, having been published in now-defunct periodicals or in volumes that, although digitized online, have not been indexed in reference bibliometric databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and Dimensions. Despite this, Gupta’s falsehoods are now being propagated outside specialist circles, as his old journal articles are being surfaced through artificial-intelligence tools that summarize search results. When someone searches for geological landmarks in the Himalayas, such as the Tandi Limestone, Google’s AI overview obliges with direct links to Gupta’s discredited papers.
Bhat now plans to rectify the digital record and says that all other journals that have published Gupta’s work should do the same. “If this problem is left as it is, unattended, it will pollute all of the geological literature in future,” he says. Gupta also published papers in Nature in the 1960s; Chris Graf, director of research integrity at Springer Nature, didn’t confirm that the journal would re-examine them. But he added that in general, when investigations of old papers are hampered by limited available information, an editorial expression of concern “is likely to be our preferred mechanism for alerting readers to potential issues”. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)
The Himalayas case raises a wider issue: how to deal with fraudulent, unethical or even merely incorrect research from decades ago, especially in an era in which much old work is digitized and AI systems can pick up studies that might previously have been neglected.