Lies, exaggerations, criminal acts, unbridled irony, alternative facts, fake news … No, we're not talking about 2017 politics. This is the 2017 world of science.

This past year, hundreds of scientific papers were retracted from professional journals. In the majority of cases involving these retractions, the reason was an innocent, yet sloppy, error in the methodology of the experiment that the authors themselves caught. But for quite a few papers, the retractions reflected scientific misconduct and a not-so-innocent attempt to tweak the data — or make it up entirely. What follows are five notable retractions from 2017, culled from the Retraction Watch blog.
So many retractions, so little time. There were many more retracted papers that almost made this 2017 "top five" list, such as several that attempted to "prove" a connection between vaccines and autism. One, titled "Systematic Assessment of Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder and Mercury Reveals Conflicts of Interest and the Need for Transparency in Autism Research," wins for irony: The authors didn't reveal the fact that they were associated with organizations involved in demonstrating a vaccine-autism connection.