Some researchers who retract their papers do so after others in the scientific community raise red flags to them about their work.Credit: EyeEm/Getty Early last month, evolutionary biologist Nicole King and postdoctoral fellow Jacob Steenwyk retracted their paper in the journal Science1. King was shaken when she realized that the paper — which attempted to use a new data-analysis approach to work out which animal lineages were the first to emerge on Earth — had serious technical errors. But the decision was still clear: “If you know you made a mistake, you’ve got to reverse it,” she says. Retractions caused by honest mistakes are extremely stressful, say researchers Retractions, which have long been associated with misconduct or poor scientific practice, can carry a lot of stigma. As of a decade ago, only about 22% of retractions resulted from authors self-reporting errors2, rather than other scientists raising concerns to journals.…