Nature's 2022 retraction notice for the Dias carbonaceous-sulfur-hydride paper cites an undisclosed, non-standard background-subtraction procedure

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Nature's retraction of "Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride" (Snider, Dasenbrock-Gammon, Ranga Dias et al., Nature 586, 373, 2020) was published 26 September 2022 as a formal Retraction Note (Nature 610, 804). The editors' own stated reason is specific and mechanistic, not a general loss-of-confidence statement: the background subtractions applied to the raw data behind the magnetic-susceptibility plots (Fig. 2a and Extended Data Fig. 7d) used "a non-standard, user-defined procedure" whose details were never specified in the paper, and whose validity was subsequently disputed. All nine authors, including Dias, disagreed with the retraction and maintained that the raw data support the paper's original claims.

This grounds, at Tier 1, a mechanism the vault previously carried only via Tier-2 science journalism describing an "implausibly smooth" susceptibility curve — see claim-hirsch-forensics-drove-dias-superconductivity-retraction. The editors' own account converges with Jorge Hirsch and Dirk van der Marel's independent technical critique (see claim-hirsch-van-der-marel-2022-csh-data-pathological-spline-quantized): both identify an unexplained, non-reproducible data-processing step as the specific point of failure, rather than a dispute over raw measurement quality itself.