Retraction Watch

Oxford researchers retract Nature paper on ‘atmospheric thirst’ for calculation errors

The authors of a June 2025 paper in Nature estimated the contribution of atmospheric evaporative demand on the severity of droughts worldwide, as shown in this figure from the article. The journal retracted the article on Sept. 2.
*S.H. Gebrechorkos et al./Nature 2025*

Nature has retracted a paper on the atmosphere’s role in the severity of droughts around the world after the authors discovered they made a coding error that skewed their measurements. The authors say they’ve already written a revised version of the paper.

The article, published in June 2025, found an increase in “atmospheric thirst,” or atmospheric evaporative demand — a measure of how much water the atmosphere draws from rivers, lakes, soil and so on — has exacerbated the severity of droughts by about 40%. The New York Times covered the work, claiming the study found atmospheric thirst “played an even bigger role than previously thought” in drought severity. The paper has been cited 337 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But the authors discovered “a calculation error” that was “not related to our data or methodology, but a coding error,” lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos told Retraction Watch in a statement sent by the University of Oxford in England. Of the 11 authors on the paper, three, including Gebrechorkos and senior author Simon Dadson, are affiliated with the university.

Journal retracts paper claiming network of corridors inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu.
*Douwe C. van der Zee/Wikimedia Commons*

A journal has retracted a paper by two Italian scientists who claimed to have found hidden structures inside of the oldest and largest of the Pyramids of Giza.

The study, published in Remote Sensing in October 2022, purportedly used synthetic aperture radar to penetrate the Pyramid of Khufu with energy pulses and process the echoes received, revealing a network of rooms, corridors and tunnels. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, as well as in a 2021 report by Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The journal retracted the study on Aug. 10 after a reader “brought concerns to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding methodological issues with this article.” The editors investigated the claims and “confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article.”

Weekend reads: Institute defends Nobel Prize winner; Stanford ex-president tries to refute fraud allegations; cardiologist’s ‘monstrous’ conflict of interest

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Editors of economics journal resign after Elsevier doesn’t renew EIC’s contract
Guest post: The uncomfortable truth an explosion of papers reveals about authors’ access to data
Elsevier to ‘soon investigate’ two Macchiarini papers more than a year after retraction request
Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication
University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent

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 approaching 700, 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):

University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent

New York University Press is pulling all copies of a book about intelligent design after the author falsely quoted another scholar in the work.

Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, by C.W. Howell, was published by NYU Press in 2025. Earlier this month, the publisher said it was “pulling the current edition from the market” and “destroying all existing inventory” after learning Howell attributed an inaccurate quote to Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, according to an Aug. 3 email Retraction Watch has seen.

The misquote stemmed from a passage in a court ruling Howell “mistakenly” read as a direct quote from Behe and attributed as such, he told us. Howell writes about the intersection of faith and science, and serves as an academic director for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication

The Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University in Japan is defending Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka against claims of image manipulation in multiple studies on which he was an author. The institute says questioning Yamanaka’s integrity without sufficient evidence is “completely unacceptable.”

Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 and works at CiRA.

On August 7, Gotham City Research LLC, a short-selling firm based in the United States, released a report alleging image manipulation in several papers by Yamanaka appearing between 2000 and 2020.

Elsevier to ‘soon investigate’ two Macchiarini papers more than a year after retraction request

Elsevier says it will begin investigating two papers coauthored by disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini “soon,” more than a year after two critics of his work formally requested the publisher retract the articles — and nearly a decade after two institutions found him guilty of misconduct for related work.

The papers, published in Biomaterials in 2009 and 2010, include descriptions of a 2008 trachea transplant in Barcelona conducted by Macchiarini — described in The Lancet that year, as well as in a five-year follow-up published in 2013. Both Lancet papers reported a successful surgery and that the patient had a “normal social and working life.” In reality, she needed stents, her lung function did not improve and she eventually had a lung removed.

The Barcelona patient survived, but at least three others who underwent Macchiarini’s synthetic trachea transplants eventually died. In 2023, a Swedish court sentenced Macchiarini to 2.5 years in prison for gross assault related to his failed transplants. So far he has accumulated 13 retractions.

Guest post: The uncomfortable truth an explosion of papers reveals about authors’ access to data

The involvement of independent academic researchers in examining data and conducting analyses is central to producing trustworthy research. Because of this, many journals require authors to sign a statement acknowledging they “had full access to all the data in the study,” and take “responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.” Indeed, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations for authorship note that authors should be “accountable for all aspects of the work.”

A rapidly increasing number of published articles rely on analyses produced via the TriNetX platform. However, TriNetX users don’t get full access to the information in the platform, muddying the truthfulness of any analyses of the data and compromising the integrity statements offered by authors and accepted by journals.

Instead, users see aggregate counts, descriptive statistics and estimated quantities, such as hazard ratios, without ever interacting with line-level data. And because the underlying data are constantly changing as new records are added, analyses run on the platform are often irreproducible, even by the researchers who originally conducted them.

Editors of economics journal resign after Elsevier doesn’t renew EIC’s contract

Six editors and nearly 60 advisory editors of Games and Economic Behavior resigned after the journal’s publisher decided not to renew the editor-in-chief’s contract.

In late July, Elsevier told Hervé Moulin, a business professor of the University of Glasgow, his six-year tenure as editor-in-chief of the journal would end in December. Moulin told Retraction Watch he was disappointed by the news, as he had expressed a desire to continue in his role.

The journal’s six editors resigned in the weeks following, according to an August 16 email, the text of which is also posted on the website for the Game Theory Society. Games and Economic Behavior is one of the group’s two official journals. As of August 19, 58 of the 62 advisory editors had resigned as well.

Weekend reads: Senators ask FDA for more oversight following deaths in China clinical trials; image duplication in Alzheimer’s papers; ‘AI Is Ruining Scholarship’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Sage issues dozens of retractions from two journals it acquired
A New Zealand journal deleted a paper for potential harm to Māori months after publishing it
Ceramics journal pulls dozens of papers flagged for integrity concerns
Defamation suit demanding Elsevier retract paper heads closer to 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):

Defamation suit demanding Elsevier retract paper heads closer to trial

A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge.

Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS’ needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled “massive” financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” under its “own standards,” but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air.

The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has “plausibly alleged actual malice” by Elsevier defined as “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.” Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler’s recommendation in July 2025.

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