A leading environmental economics journal is looking into claims that a 2025 study linking national innovation to lower carbon emissions contains data that does not match its source, after an expert in the field requested the paper be retracted.

The article appeared in Ecological Economics, the journal for the International Society for Ecological Economics and published by Elsevier. The authors, three researchers at ESSCA School of Management in Lyon, claimed to draw on data from 229 countries between 2013 and 2020 and reported a negative relationship between a country’s “innovativeness” and its carbon dioxide emissions per capita. But three months after it was published, in October 2025, the journal began investigating anomalies in the dataset, although the authors maintain none of it was fabricated.

The authors said their analysis included 229 countries. But in the years used in the study’s analysis, 2013 to 2020, the Global Innovation Index (GII) reports available online only show the performance of 126 to 143 global economies. Around 80 additional entries don’t correspond with the underlying GII.
 

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/ecological-economics-journal-apparent-data-mismatch-climate-study/

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