This is our last Weekend Reads of 2025. Our annual wrap-up at Retraction Watch will come next week, but we’re already looking forward to a new year. If you value the work we do – the in-depth reporting at Retraction Watch, the daily curated links in our newsletter, our comprehensive Retraction Watch Database – please … Continue reading Weekend reads: Court tosses out challenge to ORI funding ban; prof steps down after AI citation ‘scandal’; senator seeks journal’s COVID-19 manuscripts

Sham journals that mimic real ones can fool unsuspecting authors who are submitting a manuscript, researchers looking for references for papers — and even indexing services aiming to be comprehensive in their coverage. For three years, researcher and sleuth Anna Abalkina has been tracking these clones in the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Earlier this … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now has 400 entries

A federal court has terminated a former researcher’s lawsuit against the U.S. government agency that barred her from receiving federal funds following an agency investigation that lasted 10 years. Ivana Frech — formerly Ivana De Domenico — sued the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in 2023 after the agency concluded she engaged in research … Continue reading Court tosses out researcher’s bid to overturn funding ban

Earlier this year, Klaus Heese, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul, noticed a review article he’d worked on had finally been published. But his name wasn’t on it, nor was that of another scientist who had also been involved in preparing the manuscript. Instead, two professors Heese didn’t know had been added as authors … Continue reading Professor in India adds coauthors who ‘kindly covered’ publication fee, removes others

Dear RW readers, we look forward to wrapping up the week with Weekend Reads. If you enjoy it too, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity. Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the … Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘How long does it take to kill zombie papers?’; ‘The H-Index of Suspicion’; former Springer editors launch new journal

A World Bank report on obesity trends with at least 14 fake references in the text has been removed from the website and is being reviewed by the organization following a Retraction Watch inquiry. The report, “Nourishing Tomorrow: Addressing Obesity Through Food Systems in South Asia,” was published in March 2025 in the World Bank … Continue reading World Bank report ‘removed for review’ of nonexistent references after Retraction Watch inquiry

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has been relatively quiet in 2025, releasing just two misconduct findings with only two weeks remaining in the year — the fewest the office has released since at least 2006. ORI typically releases an average of about 10 findings a year. The office, part of the Department of Health … Continue reading ORI has released just two misconduct findings this year

Academics who publish frequently in two top business journals often have prior working relationships with the editors who handle their papers, according to a new analysis of editor-author relationships at the two publications over the last 15 years. One journal editor in chief called the results “concerning,” while another thought the analysis was looking for … Continue reading ‘Elite cohort’ of biz school scholars and editors scratch each others’ backs, study finds

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has settled a lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act, admitting researchers used images and data that were “misrepresented and/or duplicated” in support of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health. Dana-Farber agreed to pay $15 million to settle the claim. Sleuth Sholto David filed the claim in April 2024, about … Continue reading Dana-Farber settles suit alleging image manipulation for $15 million

Three years after he was let off the hook by a government commission, a former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions for plagiarizing a student thesis in a paper from 2020, Retraction Watch has learned. Muhammad Suleman Tahir, previously of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, is now professor and chair … Continue reading Exclusive: In reversal, former vice chancellor in Pakistan who was let off hook for plagiarism faces sanctions

Dear RW readers, we look forward to wrapping up the week with Weekend Reads. If you enjoy it too, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity? Others include … Continue reading Weekend reads: Springer Nature retracts papers using ‘bonkers’ dataset; preprint server welcomes AI authors; ethics editors’ COI disclosures ‘insufficient’

A Cell Press journal quietly removed part of a funding statement from a paper related to gender-affirming hormone therapy that the authors say was included in error. Experts called the move “worrying.” The authors of the paper, which appeared in Cell Reports on September 23, gave estrogen therapy to male monkeys to better understand how … Continue reading Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

A journal that last year corrected a paper claiming to show a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer has now retracted the article after the Committee on Publication Ethics got involved in the case. The extensive correction and an accompanying editorial, published in September 2024 in The … Continue reading COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer

The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation. Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute … Continue reading One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions

Muhammad Zain Yousaf, a postdoc at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, became a scholar of note overnight. Or so it would seem, based on his now-defunct Google Scholar profile: From a modest 47 in 2022 and around 100 in 2023, Yousaf’s citations jumped to 629 in 2024. His h-index, a measure combining publication and citation … Continue reading How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint

Giving Tuesday was this week, and, like many organizations, we asked for your support. The work we do is funded in part by your donations. If you value our work in rooting out scientific fraud and misconduct, exposing serial offenders, spotlighting how to fix broken systems — and bringing you this newsletter — please consider … Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘The fall of a prolific science journal’; Clinical trials by ‘super-retractors’; ‘How to Study Things That May Not Exist’

Nature has retracted a paper on melanoma after an investigation by the journal found issues with data that rendered certain results statistically insignificant. A separate institutional investigation concluded misconduct wasn’t involved, the lead author says. The research behind the article, published in April 2016, was conducted in the lab of Ashani Weeraratna, then at the … Continue reading Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted eight years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed the herbicide, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors. The safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in … Continue reading Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court

A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997. A 2019 investigation launched by the U.K. institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a … Continue reading Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching’

The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated. “The economic commitment of climate change,” which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, looked at how changes in temperature and … Continue reading Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change

Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing. The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian … Continue reading The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well. Last month we reported on allegations that one of … Continue reading Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases

Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity? Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work. Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require … Continue reading Weekend reads: How an MIT student’s AI study ‘Fell Apart’; Egyptian scientists, Russian affiliations; the ‘dangers’ of bibliometrics with ‘polluted data’

A team of researchers in Belgium got more than they expected when they tried to study potato pathogens: an unwelcome contaminant, a retraction, and a new paper the authors say is “an improvement over the first.” In a now-retracted paper in Metallomics originally published in January 2024, researchers at the University of Liège described how … Continue reading After realizing a fungus contaminated their experiments, researchers retract and redo study

Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence. To maintain the integrity of scientific literature, the professor of psychology at Brunel University of London and her colleagues are writing to journals that are publishing papers that rely on the … Continue reading Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality