Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a National IQ database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence. It has drawn criticism for the way the data were collected. Sear’s efforts have so far led to two retractions.
The database was first published in 2002 after psychologists Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen constructed what they claimed were averaged estimates of IQ scores for different countries. In 2019, Lynn, a self-proclaimed “scientific racist,” was stripped of his emeritus status by Ulster University in Northern Ireland after students protested against his views.
While Sear hasn’t tracked how many papers Lynn himself authored, she is tracking the number of studies using his dataset. She shared a list that as of now contains 174 such studies.
