Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: A tsunami of misleading medical studies; retraction calls cancer therapy timing into question; a closer look at Max Planck’s retractions

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books
A prolific evolutionary biologist caught faking data decades ago notches a new retraction
Major citation index put surgery journals on hold following Retraction Watch investigation
Increasing workload may have contributed to recent retraction at nursing journal, editor says

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 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):

Increasing workload may have contributed to recent retraction at nursing journal, editor says

Roger Watson was seeking answers. Last September, a paper in his journal had attracted criticism he thought he and his fellow editors at Nurse Education in Practice should have caught.

The February 2025 paper described the role of moulage, or simulated, realistic-looking wounds, in training nurses to perform endotracheal suction, a way of clearing out the lungs. One group used dummies with simulated bodily fluids, and the other group used regular dummies. An expert flagged the paper seven months after it was published: Tubes used in groups with or without moulage dummies had “significant size difference, which may have influenced the level of difficulty for participants to complete the suctioning task,” the expert wrote in an email Retraction Watch has seen.

The authors responded to the concerns at first, but then the conversation reached an impasse, the authors stopped responding, and the only choice, Watson said, was to retract the paper.

Major citation index put surgery journals on hold following Retraction Watch investigation

Clarivate’s influential Web of Science database of abstracts and citations has paused coverage of new content from a collection of surgery journals, including a top-ranked title in the field, following a Retraction Watch investigation from March.

Indexation in the database is widely seen as a key scholarly imprimatur and ensures visibility in literature searches and citation counts. If a journal is removed from Clarivate’s Master Journal List following review, it loses its impact factor and manuscript submissions may plummet.

The move came just a week after our investigation, published March 12, which found mandatory citation of reporting guidelines in the International Journal of Surgery (IJS) had inflated the impact factor of the open-access title, making it more attractive to authors and readers. The hold does not appear to be mentioned on the journal websites and we were not aware of it until now.

A prolific evolutionary biologist caught faking data decades ago notches a new retraction

A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted.
*shanecotee / iStock*

Anders Møller, an influential evolutionary biologist from Denmark, somehow survived the blow to his reputation after a high-profile retraction and a finding of scientific misconduct more than 20 years ago.

But a new retraction is once again raising the question of whether that fraud was just a blip in his impressive publication record or further proof, as some claim, that much of Møller’s work rests on a shaky foundation.

The latest paper to fall: Møller’s 2019 study in the journal Ecology and Evolution that reported a tenfold decline in the bugs splattered on his car windshield over two decades. The journal’s editors wrote in their retraction notice that the dataset contained “duplications” and “inconsistencies” that invalidate its conclusions.

Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books

Springer Nature will start issuing expressions of concern notices for books after investigating hundreds of its books for integrity-related problems in recent years.

The publishing giant has seen an uptick in the number of investigations for books. In 2022, Springer Nature carried out 124 such investigations. In 2023, that number grew to 207 in 2023 and 217 in 2024, Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity adviser with the publisher, told attendees of the World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, Canada, last month.

Springer Nature carried out 210 book-related probes last year, she added, and 81 in 2026 as of mid-April.

Weekend reads: Media star loses doctorate for plagiarism; journal editor resigns for AI concerns; university removes dean for fabricating data

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Publisher investigating two more papers on glyphosate safety over ghostwriting claims
Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him
Journal investigating paper on cognitive impact of generative AI
Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds
RFK Jr. has various stances on retractions. Critics say he’s ‘politicizing’ them

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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):

RFK Jr. has various stances on retractions. Critics say he’s ‘politicizing’ them

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

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s letter demanding answers from a journal that recently retracted an article about vaccines has drawn significant attention. But the inquiry isn’t the first time Kennedy has used his platform to try to influence retraction decisions, with one critic calling out a pattern by Kennedy of “politicizing” the process.

Scholars say Kennedy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has shown an inconsistent ideological approach to retractions. Last year, he called for the retraction of a study that failed to find vaccines cause harm. His recent letter to Toxicology Reports — which includes reference blunders with an 80-year-old paper and outdated COPE guidelines — criticizes the retraction of a paper tying infant deaths to vaccines. While critics call his motives political, one researcher says a key component of Kennedy’s letter – a call for more publisher transparency – aligns with improving the retraction process.

In the June 11 letter to Lawrence H. Lash, editor-in-chief of Toxicology Reports, Kennedy demanded “a full explanation” from editors for removing a 2021 study linking sudden infant death syndrome to vaccines. We reported the retraction on May 26.

Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds

Retracted scientific papers cited on Wikipedia tend to linger on the popular website for years, according to a study examining nearly 1,200 citations.

The study’s authors, led by Ph.D. candidate Haohan Shi from the Media, Technology, and Society Program at Northwestern University, used the Retraction Watch Database to compile a list of retracted papers and cross-referenced that list with Wikipedia citations. Of the 1,181 retracted citations identified, just over half were added to Wikipedia before the paper was retracted; a fifth were added after retraction but without any reader warning; and just over a quarter explicitly noted the retraction.

They also measured how long it took the Wikipedia community to correct citations added before the paper was retracted. The team found that while many corrections occurred swiftly, the median time for a correction was 3.68 years.

Journal investigating paper on cognitive impact of generative AI

A paper about the effects of generative AI use on confidence in work tasks is under investigation after critics raised questions about the study design, data analysis and ethics approval for the research.

The study, published in April in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, included 1,923 adults recruited online from the United States and Canada to perform a battery of work-like tasks assisted by AI. It garnered a press release from the American Psychological Association, which publishes the journal, and coverage in Time and Futurism.

Sandra Grinschgl of the University of Bern in Switzerland, who studies technology-driven cognitive offloading, got an alert about the study shortly after it came out. She told Retraction Watch she was initially puzzled by the vague descriptions of data collection from online participants in the study. When she looked closer at one of the bar charts, she noticed the lengths of the bars didn’t match the actual value of the labels.

Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him

On May 9, a university administrator in Afghanistan threatened in a LinkedIn post to expose what he called a publishing scam by private universities in India.

“These institutions contact academicians globally, promising payment for publishing research papers that will boost their national and international rankings,” Mohd Asif Shah, dean of the faculty of economics at Kardan University in Kabul, alleged.

The following day, Shah elaborated in a new post: “Four years ago, Woxsen University asked me to publish papers and file patents under their affiliation. I agreed, delivered, and they proudly displayed those publications on their website. Now, after four years, they are denying payment for that work.” He also complained his “patent incentives were being unilaterally reduced” from 40,000 Indian rupees (US$420) to 17,500 rupees (US$184) per patent — “a reduction of over 56%.”

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