Biology journal pulls 100+ articles and counting from special issues for peer review manipulation

Elsevier’s International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has issued more than 100 retractions and counting for manipulated peer review in guest-edited special issues. The publisher has said one more retraction is coming. 

Since June the publisher has retracted 120 papers. According to the retraction notices, the journal identified “[s]ystematic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process.”

A spokesperson for Elsevier told Retraction Watch the publisher “became aware of possible systematic manipulation and other issues such as plagiarism, image duplication, and authorship issues in a number of articles published in Special Issues” in 2025, which led them to conduct a wider investigation into more recent special issues. 

Continue reading Biology journal pulls 100+ articles and counting from special issues for peer review manipulation

BMJ Group retracts paper on COVID-19 vaccines and mortality featured in Senate hearing

BMJ Public Health has retracted a paper some — including a witness at a recent U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing — have used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths. The action comes more than two years after a researcher cited in the work flagged issues with the study. 

Published May 6, 2024, the paper used the “Our World in Data” database and the World Mortality Dataset to look at COVID-19 related deaths during the height of the pandemic. News outlets covered it, from The Telegraph — “vaccines may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” — to the New York Post, which quoted the paper’s statements about reported “serious injuries and deaths following vaccination,” a move it later corrected. 

An expression of concern, placed on the paper about a month after it was published, attempted to quell these claims, noting the study “does not establish any such link.” The notice also announced an institutional investigation by the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands, where three of the four authors worked, including corresponding author Saskia Mostert.

Continue reading BMJ Group retracts paper on COVID-19 vaccines and mortality featured in Senate hearing

A college student had to retract her paper. The move was ‘the starting point for a better study’

Rishika Porandla published a paper based on research she did in high school. As a sophomore at Princeton, she revisited the work — and found errors in the methodology, leading her to retract the study.

As a sophomore at Princeton University, Rishika Porandla took a course called “The Curious Scientist,” where students practice disciplinary research skills and act as a “PI” on a project of their choosing.   

Porandla didn’t have to think twice about what subject to dive into. In high school, she had studied the biodegradability of polyvinyl chloride and discovered a new process to break down the plastic. The finding led to one of her proudest high school achievements — a published journal article. She was eager to use the Princeton class to advance her discovery. 

From the outset, Porandla’s project for the class seemed like “a slam dunk,” Andrea DiGiorgio, the course’s instructor, told Retraction Watch.   

Continue reading A college student had to retract her paper. The move was ‘the starting point for a better study’

Weekend reads: Second gene editing death in China reported; Jason Arday’s resignation from Cambridge; Retraction Watch’s sweet 16

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 66,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Second gene editing death in China reported; Jason Arday’s resignation from Cambridge; Retraction Watch’s sweet 16

Clarivate removes hold on mega-journal Heliyon after internal audit, 650+ retractions

Clarivate has lifted its hold on Heliyon after the journal’s internal audit led to over 1,000 retractions, expressions of concern and corrections. As a result, the journal will receive an impact factor in the coming cycle, a Clarivate spokesperson said. 

Clarivate decided in September 2024 new content from Heliyon would not be indexed in its Web of Science due to concerns about quality. The journal told us at the time it was “investigating,” and since then, it has retracted over 650 articles.

Clarivate lifted the hold on May 14, and Heliyon released a statement shortly after, noting all content published while the journal was on hold will now be indexed. The statement says the audit “revealed behaviors that did not align with our policies.” As we wrote in February, the journal has previously said the concerning practices included compromised peer review, authorship irregularities, tortured phrases and citation manipulation. 

Continue reading Clarivate removes hold on mega-journal Heliyon after internal audit, 650+ retractions

Decade-long fraud by market survey firm a ‘gut punch’ for researchers

Credit: AndreyPopov/iStock

In April 2025, David Victorson, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, was polishing several manuscripts for submission when a colleague sent him a link to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. “Eight Defendants Indicted in International Conspiracy to Bill $10 Million for Fraudulent Market Survey Data,” the headline read.

Victorson couldn’t believe it. Op4G, a market research company he first worked with more than a decade earlier, was being indicted for selling bogus data between 2014 and 2023. In fact, Victorson had just used them to run an online survey related to meditation as part of a U.S. National Institutes of Health project to create a standardized mindfulness metric. He didn’t yet know whether his own data were compromised, but he knew there was no way he’d be submitting his manuscripts with those data.

“Because they were within the period of the indictment, we scrapped them entirely,” Victorson said. “It took years off our lives.”

Continue reading Decade-long fraud by market survey firm a ‘gut punch’ for researchers

RFK Jr. questions another publisher on expression of concern for a vaccine paper

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

The U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services is once again questioning a publisher on an editorial action regarding a paper on vaccination.

Published in Sage Open Medicine in 2020, the article looks at health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Its authors are Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, both longtime vaccine critics. 

Sage Open Medicine put an expression of concern on the paper on May 18. “The following article is under investigation,” it reads. “This expression of concern will remain in place until the investigation concludes, and a final decision has been made.”

Continue reading RFK Jr. questions another publisher on expression of concern for a vaccine paper

A composer published a paper on theoretical physics. His lack of credentials drew criticism.

Some people compose music or make YouTube videos for a hobby. That’s Brandon Yates’ job — so in his spare time, he tries his hand at theoretical physics. But his only published paper was questioned because of his lack of professional training in the field — despite the physicist who inspired his work saying the work looks legitimate.

Based in Las Vegas, Yates earns a living as a composer for the animated series called “Death Battle.” He also has had an “intuitive understanding of, and love for, General Relativity for as long as I can remember,” he told Retraction Watch. But he has no formal training in physics and is self-taught, he said. 

After watching a video lecture series online by Canadian physicist Eric Poisson, in January, Yates built a computer algebra program to look into rules in general relativity used to fuse two spacetimes across a thin shell, Yates said. By March, he had come across a conditional result he believed to be novel.

Continue reading A composer published a paper on theoretical physics. His lack of credentials drew criticism.

High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems

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In July 2021, John Loadsman received a manuscript about a clinical trial that immediately roused his suspicion. Then the editor-in-chief of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Loadsman asked the authors for the raw data.

They weren’t pretty. “When I looked carefully at the spreadsheet, I could see entire blocks of data that were repeated,” recalled Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and scientific sleuth at the University of Sydney. “It was obvious that this was cooked.”

He rejected the manuscript, informing both the corresponding author, Reyhan Polat of the University of Health Sciences in Ankara and Etlik City Hospital, in Turkey, and her institution about his concerns. He also made a mental note to have a look at the researcher’s published work. Over the following years, that effort drew in another sleuth and eventually prompted inquiries into more than two dozen papers by a network of researchers in Turkey.

Continue reading High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems

Celebrating Retraction Watch’s 16th birthday, how sweet it is

Suddenly, we’re 16. And what a year it has been. 

Our birthday (and annual birthday post) comes on the heels of one of the biggest stories we’ve told this year: The unreported death of a 6-year-old girl whose parents paid more than $850,000 to a lab in China to develop a therapy for her rare genetic disorder. Seven days after getting the treatment, the young girl died. 

Retraction Watch contributing writer Brendan Borrell spent countless hours seeking out experts in the field, chasing down documents and translations, and talking to the girl’s parents, who, after all they have been through, have one simple request: the retraction of a paper in Nature, in which the lab reports its preclinical results of the very therapy that caused their daughter’s death. 

It’s an utterly heartbreaking and important story brought to light in collaboration with Science, which published the story on July 23. Just a few days later, the researchers’ university announced it would launch an investigation into the girl’s death. And a few days after that, Nature placed an editor’s note on the lab’s paper, saying it would be launching an investigation as well. The story has attracted international coverage by news outlets including the New York Post, Bloomberg, Times Higher Education, Southern Weekly and the South China Morning Post. 

The story is one of more than 250 our team — Alicia Gallegos, Avery Orrall and Kate Travis, plus a small team of regular contributors — has reported in the last year. Some more highlights:

Continue reading Celebrating Retraction Watch’s 16th birthday, how sweet it is