A study suggesting OpenAI’s ChatGPT improves student learning has been retracted by Springer Nature due to analytical discrepancies. The paper, published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications in May 2025, claimed a “large positive impact” on learning performance and thinking skills.
Ben Williamson, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, called the paper’s claims “attention-grabbing” and noted it was treated as gold-standard evidence on social media. He also questioned the timeline-just 2.5 years after ChatGPT’s release-arguing high-quality studies could not have been conducted so quickly.
Despite the retraction, the paper has been cited 262 times in peer-reviewed sources and 504 times overall. It attracted nearly half a million readers and ranked in the 99th percentile for online attention.