If one day you were to see the name Max Planck on a retraction list, you'd probably think you'd clicked on some academic parody site.
After all, this is no ordinary author. Planck was the founder of quantum theory, the 1918 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, and one of the most important names in 20th-century scientific history.
But a new paper points out that two of Planck's articles, published in 1940 and 1942, are actually marked as "retracted" on Springer's digital platform.
Paper Title: The Curious Case of Max Planck retracted papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms. Paper Address: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17534
Amusingly, according to the investigation by the paper's author, these two articles were not retracted due to fabrication, error, or academic misconduct, but were victims of an algorithmic error.
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The story begins with a "Nobel Laureate Retraction List" from Retraction Watch, a website that tracks issues in academic publishing.
The author, as a researcher in the history of physics, was surprised to see Max Planck on the list because the two articles were published in the German science journal *Die Naturwissenschaften*. By then, Planck was already a world-renowned physicist, and the paper's author found it hard to believe these articles were truly retracted during his lifetime or that there were sufficient grounds for retraction later.
Link: https://retractionwatch.com/retractions-by-nobel-prize-winners/
The explanation given on the Springer platform is rather vague. The page title labels it as a "RETRACTED ARTICLE," but the statement in the PDF says, "This article has been withdrawn due to article violation"; the wording on the webpage is more specific, stating the articles were retracted due to "copyright violation."
In other words, this is likely an accident manufactured by a combination of copyright, digital archiving, and platform metadata management—these old articles were processed by the system/publisher in modern databases as copyright or duplicate publication issues.
Let's first return to the ecology of scientific publishing in the first half of the 20th century. *Die Naturwissenschaften* was founded in 1913, published by Julius Springer Verlag, and positioned somewhat like the German-language equivalent of *Nature*: it was a comprehensive science weekly covering natural sciences, medicine, and technological advances. It published both technical papers and speeches, conference reports, as well as discussions on the philosophy of science and its cultural significance.
Planck's two articles themselves were not research papers reporting new experiments or theories, but rather philosophical reflections on the nature of scientific knowledge.
The 1942 article, "The Meaning and Limits of Exact Science," is particularly typical. It was originally a lecture Planck gave in 1941 at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft in Berlin. It later circulated in multiple forms: published as a pamphlet in 1942, also appearing in *Europäische Revue* and *Die Naturwissenschaften*, and was included in a collection of Planck's speeches and essays in 1943.
Today, such a pathway could easily be identified by platforms or copyright systems as "duplicate publication." But at that time, multi-channel circulation—from lectures to journals, from pamphlets to essay collections—was simply part of how scientific ideas spread.
The case of the 1940 article, "Natural Science and the Real External World," is even more peculiar. The paper's author found no evidence of it being published elsewhere as a duplicate. One possible explanation proposed by the author is that a few months earlier in the same journal, another author, Aloys Müller, had published an article with the same title, discussing Planck's philosophical position. Planck then used the same title for a response, engaging in this intellectual debate.
Within the editorial culture of that era, this was clearly not a problem; it was even an explicit gesture of dialogue. But in later digital indexing, copyright management, and metadata systems, two identical titles might be flagged as a suspicious duplicate.
The paper also points out that these two "retracted" articles have even become blank pages on Springer's platform. Normally, even if a paper is retracted, the original text is preserved with a retraction notice added to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. But here, the two-page article from 1940 and the nine-page article from 1942 have both been erased on the digital platform. To read the original today, you can't find it at the original publisher Springer; you have to go to the non-profit Internet Archive.
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At this point, the matter is no longer just the amusing story of "Planck being mistakenly retracted"; it's a failure of modern academic publishing infrastructure. When historical literature enters modern digital publishing platforms, who has the right to decide what counts as "duplicate publication," what counts as "copyright violation," and what should continue to be seen?
The paper's author argues that concepts like "duplicate publication" and "self-plagiarism" are not eternal, unchanging standards of academic ethics. They are modern categories bound up with bibliometrics, research evaluation, copyright transfer, and commercial publishing platforms from the late 20th century onwards. The paper explicitly states that "self-plagiarism" is a relatively recent concept that has gained prominence with the evaluation systems that measure academic productivity by paper counts since the 1990s.
This is also a point familiar to today's academic system: the issue isn't just "what the content is," but also "how the content is represented by the system."
Once a historical article enters a database, it is broken down into structured objects like DOI, title, author, copyright status, retraction labels, PDF files, citation records, etc. Once platforms process old literature automatically or semi-automatically according to contemporary rules, they may rewrite past normal publishing practices as today's violations.
This mismatch is particularly alarming in the AI era.
When we talk about training data, data cleaning, literature databases, knowledge graphs, and RAG today, we often assume that digital knowledge is stable, retrievable, and callable. But this incident reminds us that digital archives are not a neutral "mirror of the past"; they are a set of filters imbued with commercial logic, legal assumptions, and platform rules. Data can be renamed, re-categorized by platforms, or even replaced with blank pages.
A modern copyright and metrics system retroactively judged normal pre-digital scientific communication practices as suspicious operations. More seriously, this judgment didn't remain at the label level; it directly affected the accessibility of historical literature.
For the knowledge production systems entering the AI era, a wrong label, a missing PDF, or an opaque copyright handling can all be further amplified by models, search engines, and academic tools. Future AI assistants might not know that Planck's articles were "mistakenly retracted"; they might only see the cold, hard "retracted" marker in the database.
When scientific memory is increasingly entrusted to databases, publishers, platform rules, and commercial infrastructure, can we still accurately see science's past?
Reference Link: https://www.science.org/content/article/why-have-papers-one-history-s-most-famous-physicists-been-retracted
This article is from the WeChat public account "Almost Human" (ID: almosthuman2014), author: Focus on Academia
