Article Retraction Watch Updates

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How you can help improve the visibility of retractions: Introducing NISO’s Recommended Practice for Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC)
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/05/h...cern-crec/

In the majority of cases, retracted publications continue to be cited as if the retraction had not occurred. So how do we better disseminate the editorial status of retracted work?

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Elsevier withdraws plagiarized paper after original author calls journal out on LinkedIn
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/04/e...-linkedin/

In late May, one of Sasan Sadrizadeh’s doctoral students stumbled upon a paper with data directly plagiarized from his previous work...

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‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/03/a...-that-way/

How well do databases flag retracted articles?

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Food science journal retracts 10 papers for compromised peer review
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/02/f...er-review/

A research group based in Pakistan has had 10 of their papers retracted from Wiley’s "Food Science & Nutrition" based on flaws in the peer review process...

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‘We authors paid a heavy price’: Journal retracts all 23 articles in special issue
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/01/w...ial-issue/

A journal has retracted an entire special issue over concerns the guest-edited papers underwent a “compromised” peer review process...

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Journal retracts letter to the editor about predatory journals for ‘legal concerns’
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/12/j...-concerns/

A journal has retracted a letter to the editor and removed the online version from its website “because legal concerns were raised to the Publisher,” according to the notice. The retracted letter had referred to multiple journals as “predatory.”

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‘Rare’ criminal charges for data manipulation in Cassava case send a ‘powerful message’: lawyers
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/11/r...e-lawyers/

The recent criminal indictment of a medical school professor and former scientific advisor to Cassava Sciences on fraud charges for manipulating images in scientific papers and applications for federal funding is a “rare” outcome for such alleged actions that “sends a very, very powerful message.”

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Author blames retraction on ‘Chinese censorship’
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/10/a...ensorship/

A former assistant professor of international relations at Yibin University in Sichuan, China, said he was fired from his job and “forced” to retract a paper on COVID-19 because the article did not “paint a good picture of the Chinese government.”

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University president faces allegations of duplication, institution says no misconduct
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/09/u...isconduct/

The president of the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT) has corrected two of his papers and is set to correct another amid allegations of duplication – sometimes inelegantly referred to as “self-plagiarism” – despite a university committee clearing him of misconduct.

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The wolf in Scopus’ clothing: Another hijacked journal has indexed nearly 900 articles
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/08/t...-articles/

A prolific hijacked journal has managed to breach the defenses of Scopus, one of the world’s leading academic databases. This time, the target is the award-winning journal Community Practitioner, the official publication of the UK-based organization Unite-CPHVA...

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‘Mistakes were made’: Paper by department chair earns expression of concern as more questioned
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/19/m...uestioned/

A 14-year-old paper has earned an expression of concern after an anonymous whistleblower found evidence of image duplication in the work. The authors have had images from several more papers flagged on PubPeer...

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Supplement maker sues critic for defamation, spurring removal of accepted abstract
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/18/s...-abstract/

A Frontiers journal has taken down the abstract of a “provisionally accepted” article about harms from an herbal supplement after the company that sells the products sued the first author for defamation.

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Scopus is broken – just look at its literature category
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/17/s...-category/

As Retraction Watch recently reported, three of the top 10 philosophy journals in the highly influential Scopus database turned out to be fakes: Not only did these dubious journals manage to infiltrate the list, but they also rose to its top by trading citations. This news is embarrassing in itself, but it is hardly shocking. Our rankings-obsessed academic culture has proven time and again that it is prone to data manipulation. Rankings for both publications and institutions are routinely hacked by scholars, editors, and administrators who are ready to tweak or even falsify numbers as needed. The problems with the Scopus journal rankings, however, run much deeper...

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Exclusive: Kavli prize winner threatens to sue critic for defamation
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/16/k...efamation/

[i]One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned.  In a cease and desist letter, a lawyer representing Chad Mirkin, a chemist and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, accused Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research.

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Did Flint water crisis set kids back in school? Paper saying so is ‘severely flawed,’ say critics
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/15/d...y-critics/

A paper finding kids did worse in school following the Flint water crisis is “severely flawed and unreliable,” according to critics who were deeply involved in exposing the crisis. The paper has now earned an addendum from the authors, but the critics say it should be retracted...

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Authors up past 60 retractions amid ongoing investigation
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/26/a...stigation/

A group of researchers in Iran now have had more than 60 papers retracted for concerns about peer review and plagiarism as a publisher investigates its back catalog. One of the researchers, A. Salar Elahi, now ranks 7th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

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‘A proper editor would be horrified’: Why did a pediatric journal publish articles on the elderly?
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/25/a...e-elderly/

In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.

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Exclusive: Prof plagiarized postdoc’s work in now-retracted paper, university found
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/24/e...ity-found/

A political scientist in Canada copied his postdoc’s work without credit in a paper, according to the retraction notice and a university inquiry report.

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Elsevier investigating geology journal after allegations of pal review
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/23/e...al-review/

Elsevier is investigating the journal Geoscience Frontiers after a PubPeer thread flagged an editorial advisor whose articles in the journal were edited by his frequent co-authors.

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Giant rat penis redux: AI-generated diagram, errors lead to retraction
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/22/g...etraction/

In an episode reminiscent of the AI-generated graphic of a rat with a giant penis, another paper with an anatomically incorrect image has been retracted after it attracted attention on social media. The authors admit using ChatGPT to make the diagram.

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Journal retracts paper on chiropractic product after company complains
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/01/j...complains/

An article about the overuse of spinal imaging has been retracted after the owner of a chiropractic product it criticized in passing complained to the journal...

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Cancer paper retracted 11 years after reported plagiarism
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/31/c...lagiarism/

In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief...

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Science and the significant trend towards spin and fairytales
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/29/s...ore-129740

In science, publishers and editors of academic journals prefer to publish demonstrably new findings – gold – rather than replications or refutations of findings which have been published already. This “novelty pressure” requires presentation of results that are “significant” – usually that includes being “statistically significant.”

[...] How do researchers create the illusion of novelty in a result when the finding has a probability value close to, but on the wrong side of, the stated probability threshold – for example, a probability of 0.06? Talk it up, spin out a story! It’s the fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin in modern garb.

Here are more than 500 examples of pretzel logic researchers have used to make claims of significance despite p values higher than .05. It would be comical if not for the serious obfuscation of science which the stories cause...

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‘Violated’: Engineering professor found her name on four papers she didn’t write
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/09/v...dnt-write/

“I became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.

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‘No animosity between us’: Lungless frog finding retracted after 16 years
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/08/n...-16-years/

In May, another team of herpetologists, using more sophisticated tools, said they’ve found evidence of lungs – tiny but functional – in the creatures.

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Paper claiming to discover new pain syndrome retracted
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/07/p...retracted/

Researchers who said they discovered a new disease akin to rheumatoid arthritis, but caused by pollution, are standing by their claim despite the retraction of their paper last month.

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PNAS corrects article by Kavli prize winner who threatened to sue critic
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/06/p...ue-critic/

Readers will “be unaware that this correction results from my comment, which Chad Mirkin tried to silence with a legal threat, and that PNAS decided not to publish,” Lévy said. “They will also not know that the results are from an interim report of a clinical trial that stopped several years ago.Thus this correction does nothing to correct the main problem” of the article."

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Journal republishes chiropractic paper it had retracted after legal threats
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/05/j...l-threats/

A journal has republished an edited version of a paper it retracted after a distributor of a chiropractic product the paper criticized wrote in to complain.

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A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/16/a...elsewhere/

When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work. [...] Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere...

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Authors retract quantum physics paper from Science after finding mistakes
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/15/a...-mistakes/

A team of physicists has retracted a paper from Science after they discovered mistakes in their data and statistical analysis when following up on their work...

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Exclusive: Publisher to retract article for excessively citing one researcher after Retraction Watch inquiry
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/14/e...h-inquiry/

A paper that cited a single researcher’s work in 53 of 64 references will be retracted following our inquiries, the publisher of the journal has told Retraction Watch...

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Former Maryland dept. chair with $19 million in grants faked data in 13 papers, feds say
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/13/f...-feds-say/

A former department chair engaged in research misconduct in work funded by 19 grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity...

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What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/12/w...nd-action/

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of “What’s in a picture?  The temptation of image manipulation,” in which I described the problem of image manipulation in biomedical research. Two decades later, much has changed...

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Journal retracts article for plagiarized images after trying to gag researcher who complained
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/23/j...omplained/

The journal Cureus retracted an article for plagiarized images after questioning the motives of the researcher who said her images were taken.

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Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/22/s...-counting/

A journal that lost its impact factor in June is in the midst of a cleanup operation, issuing nearly 140 retractions so far this year.

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Exclusive: Biochemistry journal retracts 25 papers for ‘systematic manipulation’ of peer review
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/22/e...er-review/

A journal of the UK-based Biochemical Society is retracting 25 papers after finding “systematic manipulation of our peer-review and publication processes by multiple individuals...”

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‘Coding’ errors prompt retraction of paper on long COVID in kids
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/20/c...d-in-kids/

JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition.

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“Deceit, delusion, and a classic medical fraud”: An excerpt from a new book about a cancer treatment hoax
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/20/d...ment-hoax/

It is a story that resonates with the present: A 1950s cancer treatment hoax that showed "charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery."

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Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/19/f...stigation/

A physiology journal has retracted two papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles.
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Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/29/r...or-emails/

A researcher who posted on LinkedIn about a paper that plagiarized his work says he’s now the subject of an email campaign making false allegations about his articles.

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First-time scientific sleuths prompt nine retractions for neurosurgery group
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/28/f...ery-group/

Two Dutch researchers were preparing a review of preclinical animal models for hemorrhagic stroke last July when they stumbled across a disturbing pattern in the literature.

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Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/27/e...isconduct/

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.

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A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/26/a...-happened/

In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized. [...] Yet the article remains intact, more than a year later, with the publisher blaming the delay on staffing changes at the journal.

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Swiss medical association accused of forcing publishing subsidiary into insolvency
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/05/s...nsolvency/

A Swiss medical publisher has ceased operations, including shuttering nationally prominent journals, after its parent organization, the Swiss Medical Association FMH, allegedly forced it into bankruptcy.

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‘The PubPeer conundrum:’ One view of how universities can grapple with a ‘waterfall of data integrity concerns’
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/04/t...-research/

PubPeer has played a key role in a growing number of cases of misconduct, allowing sleuths to publicly shine light in shadowy corners and prompting action by many universities. But that has also meant that universities can feel overwhelmed by a deluge of PubPeer comments.

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Faked data prompts retraction of Nature journal study claiming creation of a new form of carbon
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/03/f...of-carbon/

The journal Nature Synthesis has pulled a high-profile article describing the creation of a new type of carbon after a university investigation found some data were made up.

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Exclusive: Editor resigns after he says publisher blocked criticism of decision to retract paper on gender dysphoria
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/03/e...ore-129938

In the canceled commentary, which contained several instances of opinion and conjecture, Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and a coauthor of the 2023 paper, argued that retractions are “increasingly a vehicle for scientific censorship.” He laid out the details of how his work was withdrawn and speculated about the publisher’s motivations.

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Journal to retract two articles more than six months after VA said they had fake images
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/02/j...ke-images/

The Journal of Cellular Physiology, a Wiley title, will retract two articles by an arthritis researcher the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found to have engaged in research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.