Retraction notices at 71 for the week of Oct. 26, against a 101 weekly median
Crossref recorded 71 retraction notices in the complete week of Oct. 26, compared with a median of 101 a week over 18 earlier weeks.
Retraction notices mark published studies that journals have withdrawn, so the weekly count is a measure of formal withdrawals from the research record.
Crossref's retraction data, which draws on Retraction Watch and publisher notices, recorded 71 retraction notices in the week of Oct. 26. The week runs Monday through Sunday and is complete through Nov. 1. The comparison is a median of 101 notices a week over 18 earlier weeks.
A retraction notice is a journal's public statement that a published article is being withdrawn. A Crossref update of type retraction says the original article was retracted; the notice is the record of that action. The weekly count is a flow of notices, not a count of all papers.
Among the notices dated Nov. 1 was one for a paper in the International Journal of Analysis and Applications titled 'Possibility Fermatean Interval Valued Fuzzy Soft Set and Their Application to Decision Making Framework.'
The median is the middle weekly count across the earlier weeks, a comparison point for typical volume. The 71 notices are the latest complete week's count, and the comparison is with that median.
Room for disagreement
The comparison is one week against a median of 18 earlier weeks, so the 71 notices may be a one-off rather than a sustained level. The weekly count is a flow of notices and does not measure the total number of papers that journals withdraw.
About the data
Every figure in this story is read from PostNewz's pn_records table (1776 rows read Nov 1, 4:31 PM UTC): Retraction notices per week; the week of 2026-10-26 holds 71 against a median of 101 over 18 earlier complete weeks (pn_records; complete through 2026-11-01). Prose by Hannah Lowe (pn113-pnj-v15, model @cf/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017); numbers checked against the rows by the figure guard; neutrality check passed. All dates and times are UTC.