This study assesses the retractions of scientific articles in engineering journals indexed on the Web of Science from 1945 to 2015. The data set was built based on documents containing the keywords retracted, retraction, withdrawal, or redress. We used database exploration techniques, including Structured Query Language and analysis of variance, for data analysis. We analyzed 238 retractions published by 117 journals. The most common reason for retraction was unethical research, and higher impact factors journals tended to publish more retractions. In (...) conclusion, most of the analyzed retractions were the result of unethical research and were retracted by editors. (shrink)