Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Journals and the ‘Mathpocalypse’; autism paper earns EOC; Cell Press investigating bribery allegations

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Japanese institute finds materials researcher with 41 retractions guilty of ‘extensive’ manipulation
Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted
Thousands of research studies violate journal policies on collaborations between editors and authors
Journal updates retraction notice as Princeton student author stays in the spotlight

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 800, 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):

Journal updates retraction notice as Princeton student author stays in the spotlight

A Wiley journal has corrected a retraction notice to clarify the author, a Princeton student, never conducted the study in the first place, as the student has gained publicity for visits to the offices of Texas Congressional delegation.

The paper, by Rishika Porandla, purportedly described a new way to break down polyvinyl chloride plastic by mixing it with gold nanoparticles and blasting it with an electron beam. Macromolecular Materials and Engineering retracted the study this May after Porandla, an astrophysics student at Princeton who completed the study while in high school, notified editors of methodological errors in the work.

But following an Aug.10 Retraction Watch story highlighting Porandla’s decision to retract her own paper after she contacted us about her initiative to “correct the scientific record,” commenters on our site and on PubPeer raised doubts about whether the experiments described in the study were genuine. Porandla later told us she never conducted the experiments.

Thousands of research studies violate journal policies on collaborations between editors and authors

A tool developed to mine metadata and find past collaborations between handling editors and authors has turned up thousands of cases that breach journal policies on such relationships. *J. Di Scala et al/JCDL ’26*

Over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers from two publishers breach journal policies about past collaborations between handling editors and authors, a new analysis has found.

The work — presented October 15 at the 26th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Frisco, Texas — examined how often research studies published by journals run by the Public Library of Science and MPDI violate the publishers’ policies covering conflicts of interest.

PLOS requires that a handling editor of a manuscript and its authors haven’t coauthored papers together in the previous five years, while MDPI’s limit is three years.

To mine those relationships, Jules Di Scala, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, and his colleagues developed a tool called EditorCheck. It scans metadata files of published papers to collect the names of handling editors of each manuscript. It then searches the database Dimensions for any papers on which the handling editor and author were coauthors.

Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted

*An illustration of a cell secreting exosomes. Meletios Verras/iStock*

In a February 2018 editorial, Rod Rohrich, a plastic surgeon and the former president of the World Association of Medical Editors, blasted predatory journals for “the damage that these illegitimate open access journals do to the reputation of legitimate, credible ones.”

Two years later, he wrote about how his team at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open, the journal he founded in 2013, had demonstrated to authors and readers that they had created a rigorous peer-review process and were “advancing patient safety and outcomes and elevating the science of plastic surgery globally.”

But an investigation by Retraction Watch raises questions about the way Rohrich, who is now editor emeritus at the journal, has promoted preliminary and sometimes misleading research about products to which he has financial ties. That includes exosomes, which are often derived from stem cells and have increasingly been touted — with limited evidence — for skin care, hair loss and wound healing.

Japanese institute finds materials researcher with 41 retractions guilty of ‘extensive’ manipulation

An investigation by a national research institute in Japan has concluded one of its former researchers fabricated and falsified figures in seven papers. Two publishers confirmed they are investigating the articles.

Joseph Raj Xavier, of Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in Chennai, India, has lost 10 other papers this year alone, according to the Retraction Watch Database. His total is currently 41 retractions, earning him a spot on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, found Xavier guilty of fabrication and falsification in “scanning electron microscope images, atomic force microscope images, and scanning electrochemical microscope images, among others,” according to a translation of an investigation report released September 29.

Weekend reads: Computer science conferences impose caps; Lancet strikes to continue; Is this the ‘mathocalypse’?

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A company named Springer that isn’t the publisher is offering authorship for sale. And now it isn’t, following our story.
Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity
Former Crick Ph.D. student loses COVID vaccine paper for fabrication
Paper touted by MD Anderson gets expression of concern for data ‘concerns’
Journal retracts, republishes paper on Long COVID treatment trial

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):

‘Springer’ agency website offering authorship for sale goes down following Retraction Watch story

A screenshot from the “Springer Journals Online” website before it went down on Friday.

The website for Springer Journals Online, an agency offering authorship slots in articles in exchange for payment, has gone offline, four days after Retraction Watch published its investigation into its activities.

As we reported on Monday, the agency was soliciting researchers offering services that included securing authorship in research articles intended for journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE, among others.

Springer Journals Online did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email asking why the website was unavailable, if it had halted operations, or if it wished to address our previous story. No one answered calls made via WhatsApp.

Journal retracts, republishes paper on Long COVID treatment trial

Annals of Internal Medicine has retracted a paper on treatments for Long COVID because the authors did not report dosing information for metformin, one of the drugs tested in the study. The editor-in-chief of the journal called the exclusion “sloppy” and “inaccurate.”

The same day the journal retracted the paper, it published a new version addressing the exclusion. But one researcher told Retraction Watch the replacement still leaves unanswered questions.

Published in March, the clinical trial found the antidepressant fluvoxamine – marketed as Luvox – reduced fatigue and metformin showed no significant benefit for patients with long-term fatigue and other chronic symptoms following COVID illness. Other studies have found fluvoxamine helped reduce depression in patients with Long COVID, and researchers have found starting metformin within three days of being diagnosed with COVID-19 can help prevent long-term effects of the disease.

Paper touted by MD Anderson gets expression of concern for data ‘concerns’

A 2025 paper identified a protein (stained in brown) that plays a role in bone metastases.
*Image courtesy of Li Ma via MD Anderson*

Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern over “a series” of data concerns in a paper lauded by MD Anderson Cancer Center last year for identifying “a new driver” of bone metastasis.

The article, published in May 2025, has been the subject of a long and growing thread on PubPeer since April, where critics have been raising concerns about numerous images that appear to have been duplicated. The majority of the paper’s 22 authors are affiliated with MD Anderson in Houston, with at least two authors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

In June, the journal issued a correction to the paper, stating the authors “identified errors” during cross-checking of the original data, including incorrect and misplaced images.

Former Crick Ph.D. student loses COVID vaccine paper for fabrication

Science Translational Medicine has retracted a paper on COVID-19 vaccines after an institutional investigation revealed a former Ph.D. student fabricated data and falsified images in the article. The retraction is the former student’s second for fabrication this year.

The July 2022 article looked at whether a vaccine targeting a particular part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could help defend against a wider range of COVID-19 variants in mice. It has been cited 83 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the October 14 retraction notice, lead author Kevin Ng, formerly a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London, was responsible for fabricated data in one of the figures and falsifying images in another. Ng admitted responsibility for the fabrication during the editorial investigation, the notice states, which “casts doubt on some other experiments presented in the paper, for which primary data and samples are unavailable, precluding post hoc verification.”

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