Retraction notices: 70 in the week of Oct. 12, below the 101 weekly median

Crossref's retraction data, which the organisation maintains with Retraction Watch, counts retraction notices by the Monday-to-Sunday week they carry. For the week of Oct. 12, the count was 70 notices.

The comparison point is the median of the earlier weeks in the series: 101 notices a week across 15 weeks. A median is the middle value of a set, so half of those 15 weeks came in above 101 and half below. This week's 70 sits under that middle value.

Weekly counts in the same series have been uneven. The lowest was 24 notices in the week of June 29; the highest was 168 in the week of Sept. 28.

Four of the notices dated Oct. 16 appear in Journal of Ophthalmology, Frontiers in Allergy, Future Science OA and Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, according to the same Crossref records. A Crossref update of type retraction states that the original article was retracted; the notice is the record of the withdrawal, not a finding about how the original study was conducted.

Room for disagreement

One week is a short window, and the weekly series has ranged from 24 to 168 notices, so a single reading of 70 is well inside that spread. The count also follows the date on the notice, which need not match when the underlying paper was published.