In what EIC calls an ‘honest mistake,’ journal approves paper without peer reviewing it

For most researchers, having an article accepted comes with constructive feedback from editors and reviewers. But when a sociology researcher learned his article was accepted at a Taylor & Francis journal, he was surprised to find the journal had skipped the peer review process altogether. 

Martino C. submitted his article on the effects of economic instability on political ideology in Slovakia to the journal Democracy and Security on October 15. (We’ve withheld the author’s last name at his request for digital privacy reasons.) He told Retraction Watch he was hoping peer reviews would help him improve his argument. 

But on January 13, the paper was marked “Accepted” in the journal’s submission portal without feedback.

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Vietnam researchers face bans and funding cuts for violating integrity rules

Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Researchers in Vietnam who fabricate data or plagiarize papers may be permanently barred from future scientific work, according to new guidance from the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

The new framework, announced May 25,  requires science and technology organizations to implement rules against research misconduct, and it outlines a process for investigating and sanctioning violations. The recommended penalties include written warnings, correction or retraction requests, public apologies, role suspensions, returning research funding, and bans from scientific projects. Violations of scientific integrity must also be recorded in the National Digital Platform for Science, Technology, and Innovation Management, according to the framework.

Researchers who use artificial intelligence inappropriately may also be subject to stiff sanctions. The framework warns researchers should not use AI to create fake data, images, or references nor unverified AI-generated material used as a reference. 

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A researcher’s unusually high h-index gives a window into an expansive citation network

dem10/istock

With an h-index of 75, computer scientist Thippa Reddy Gadekallu ranks among the world’s most highly cited researchers. But the speed and means of his ascent to those lofty heights of scholarship has been as remarkable as the achievement itself. 

In less than a decade, Gadekallu, a professor at Zhejiang A&F University in China,  has managed to bootstrap himself from scientific obscurity by collaborating with colleagues around the world who cite each other’s work in ways that have raised questions. In some years, Gadekallu received more citations than Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and the top-rated computer scientist on Google Scholar.

Earlier work uncovered a network of reviewers on papers Gadekallu edited who frequently suggested adding citations to his work. A closer look by Retraction Watch shows the impact of that strategy on Gadekallu’s h-index, and reveals additional possible collaborators in the network.

Continue reading A researcher’s unusually high h-index gives a window into an expansive citation network

Elsevier retracts study tying sudden infant death syndrome to vaccinations

Elsevier has retracted a 2021 study claiming sudden infant death syndrome is linked to vaccines over concerns the paper might influence patient care.  

The single-author study, by longtime vaccine critic Neil Z. Miller and published in Toxicology Reports, found 75 percent of SIDS cases reported occurred within seven days of vaccination, suggesting the fatalities are tied to immunizations. In an April 9 notice, Elsevier said it initiated an investigation into the paper after concerns arose from readers about potential research errors and methodological flaws.

According to the removal notice, editor-in-chief Lawrence H. Lash determined the author’s response did not “satisfactorily address” the concerns, particularly, the “serious methodological flaws” in using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to infer a correlation between vaccination and SIDS. 

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Critics of birdsong study fight to be named in Nature’s retraction

A zebra finch in New South Wales, Australia. Source: JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Researchers who flagged methodological issues in a paper on birdsong a year and a half before Nature retracted it say they should be credited in the editorial notice. But the editors have refused, with one telling the critics the paper was retracted for unrelated reasons.

The March 2024 study at the center of the dispute looked at how sexual selection may drive song patterns in male zebra finches. Nature retracted the paper last month because two of the synthetic song pairs used in the study were found to be unreliable, according to the notice. All three authors agreed to the retraction. 

Todd Roberts, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch the critics now asking for credit “prompted us to check the synthetic song pairs used in our paper.” He said his team did not do the reliability analysis of the pairs until after publication.

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Weekend reads: arXiv to ban researchers with hallucinated references; U.S. restrictions on foreign coauthors; retracted papers by Max Planck

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 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 65,000 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: arXiv to ban researchers with hallucinated references; U.S. restrictions on foreign coauthors; retracted papers by Max Planck

Widely criticized keto diet study retracted

Aamulya/iStock

A 2025 paper claiming the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques has been retracted after widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims. The journal found “the identified errors are too great to be corrected with a corrigendum,” according to the March 11 retraction notice.

In April 2025, JACC: Advances published the study, which looked at plaque build-up in 100 otherwise generally healthy people who had experienced an increase in their cholesterol levels while being on a keto diet. The study claimed scans performed one year apart by the company Cleerly showed the diet was not associated with the development of arterial plaques. 

This finding went against what previous studies had found, and it led to what Wired called “a new war in the nutrition world.” 

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How the media hypes “research that is absurd on its face”

Aaron Brown says his new book, Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth from a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation, “isn’t an exposé of fraud—Retraction Watch covers that ground. It’s about legitimate-looking research that is absurd on its face.” 

Published this month by Wiley, Brown uses dozens of case studies to show “why widely reported and influential studies in top journals are not just wrong, but obviously and egregiously illogical or contrary to simple fact. My focus is less on the policy and statistical errors than on why no one seems to care,” he says.

Brown is a risk manager working in hedge fund management. He also teaches statistics at New York University and the University of California San Diego and writes columns for Reason and Bloomberg, among other outlets. We asked him to tell us more about how he thinks about the nexus of science, journalism and the publish-or-perish system that also pushes researchers to engage with non-experts to promote their work.

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Feud between physicists ends in defamation verdict

The Court of Rieti, Italy

A prolonged feud between two physicists in Italy that has played out for years in journal letters and blog posts has resulted in a defamation award for one of the rivals. 

Lorenzo Iorio and Ignazio Ciufolini have sparred for more than 20 years over claims of plagiarism, sock puppetry and defamation. After two criminal lawsuits against Iorio failed, Ciufolini took the spat to civil court where the Court of Rieti on April 15 ordered Iorio to pay Ciufolini €15,000 (roughly US$17,500) for defaming Ciufolini in blogs and online journals. 

In her eight-page decision, Honorary Judge Francesca Tosi said the statements Iorio made about Ciufolini, which date back to 2011, were more than “mere criticism” justifying a difference of opinion. 

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‘Comically bad’ datasets used to train clinical models for stroke and diabetes 

A dataset on Kaggle purportedly showing people who have had a stroke includes images of Sylvester Stallone from Rambo and other celebrities. Source

Scrolling through an online image dataset, Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, pointed out a few familiar faces. Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, and then again on the red carpet. “This is just ridiculous,” Barnett said. George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig all appear more than once, often with the same image. “You can see,” Barnett said, “this is just a comically bad dataset.”

This particular dataset, collected in a folder titled “droopy” and hosted on an open-source repository called Kaggle, underpins a paper published in Scientific Reports – not as a find-the-celebrity game, but as a training set for a predictive clinical model for early detection of strokes. 

The paper is the most recent example of a much wider problem that Barnett and his Ph.D. student Alexander Gibson have documented with Kaggle, which is owned by Google and hosts datasets uploaded by users that researchers and machine learning practitioners can use to build predictive models. By examining two other Kaggle datasets on stroke and diabetes, both of which included tabular patient data, Gibson and Barnett traced how the data move through the scientific literature and in some cases, into clinical use. Their work, described in a preprint posted to medRxiv in February, already has led to several retractions of the papers using these dubious datasets. 

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