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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New rule in Peru restricts authors with retractions from getting special bonuses

Peru’s Ministry of Education headquarters in Lima.
ANDINA/Editora Perú

In an ongoing effort to combat scientific misconduct, Peru has passed new rules that bar research faculty at public universities there from receiving special bonuses if they’ve had one or more retractions in the last three years.

The conditions, published March 2, apply to faculty members at public universities who are eligible for special bonuses funded by the Ministry of Education. Peruvian researchers who participate in one or more research projects qualify for the monthly bonuses, which range from 2,616.50 to 4,434.91 Peruvian soles, or US$699.60 to $1,185.80, according to a summary in the new rules. 

The restrictions come after a 2024 investigative commission in Peru identified significant scientific fraud by criminal networks involved in buying and selling academic research. Transactions by three presumed criminal networks amounted to 11.42 million soles, or roughly $3 million, between 2019 and 2023, according to the commission’s report.   

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Weekend reads: Autism-vaccine researcher arraigned; ‘accidental watermarks’ in medical literature; mass resignations and zombie journals

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 64,000 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.

I Support Retraction Watch

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: Autism-vaccine researcher arraigned; ‘accidental watermarks’ in medical literature; mass resignations and zombie journals

Nine years after journalist raised concerns, BMJ Group journal retracts stent paper

A BMJ Group journal has retracted a paper nearly nine years after a journalist raised concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest and the study’s details contradicting those of its trial registration. The researchers also excluded a patient’s death from the study, the retraction notice says. 

The study, published in Open Heart in May 2017, described the results of a clinical trial that tested commercially available stents with microengineered grooves produced by Abbott Vascular.

But four months later, veteran cardiology journalist Larry Husten pointed out the clinical trial registration described a plan to employ two stents produced by a different device maker – Palmaz Scientific, a company that funded the work and was owned by one of the authors. He also wrote that records “indicate that one patient in the trial died as a result of pancreatitis. It seems unlikely that this was related to the stent but shouldn’t this information have been reported in the Open Heart paper?” 

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Elsevier journal removes two 42-year-old papers on cesium as a cancer treatment

An Elsevier journal has removed two papers on a discredited alternative treatment for cancer nearly half a century after they were published, after researchers found a quarter of patients in case reports of the therapy, cesium chloride, died from taking the substance. 

Some alternative medicine advocates marketed cesium chloride as a cancer treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, although the risks and ineffectiveness of the therapy have been known for decades. In 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about “significant safety risks” associated with the salt. 

Marcel van der Heyden, a professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, told Retraction Watch he and his students came across the articles while writing a review of case reports on the use of cesium. Although the therapy was supported online and in health books, he said, all pointed to two 1984 papers in Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior: “Cesium therapy in cancer patients” by Hellfried Sartori and “The high pH therapy for cancer tests on mice and humans” by Aubrey Keith Brewer.

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Reviewer finds ‘top pharmaceutical scientist’ has a self-citation problem

Daniel Bar-Shalom, a pharmacist at the University of Copenhagen, was incensed.

He’d been asked to review a manuscript by Muhammad Imran Qadir, an associate professor at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, Pakistan. According to his institution’s website, Qadir was the “top pharmaceutical scientist” in the country. But Bar-Shalom thought the introduction to the paper felt like it could have been written by a student. The real problems started in the middle of the article, however, in what Bar-Shalom came to think of as “the fill of a shit sandwich.”

There, sprinkled throughout the text, were several irrelevant and trivial sentences. “Novel drugs and vaccines are being made or designed by scientists,” read one. “Genomics and proteomics have been longstanding tools in the creation of novel drugs,” another stated.

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Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).

While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction. 

“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”

Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.

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Weekend reads: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’

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 64,000 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.

I Support Retraction Watch

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: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’