Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on 'bonkers' dataset
8 DECEMBER 2025
Scientific publisher Springer Nature has begun to retract dozens of papers that relied on a dataset fraught with ethical and reliability concerns, The Transmitter has learned. Five papers have been retracted since 16 November, and 33 more retractions are planned, says Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, resolutions.
The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.
The dataset contains more than 2,900 photos of children’s faces, half of which are labeled as autistic and the other half as not autistic.
After learning about a paper that cites the dataset, “I went and downloaded the dataset, and I was completely horrified,” says Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. “When I saw how it was created, I just thought, ‘This is absolute bonkers.’”
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/exclusive-springer-nature-retracts-removes-nearly-40-publications-that-trained-neural-networks-on-bonkers-dataset/