Retraction Watch

Decade-long fraud by market survey firm a ‘gut punch’ for researchers

In April 2025, David Victorson, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, was polishing several manuscripts for submission when a colleague sent him a link to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. “Eight Defendants Indicted in International Conspiracy to Bill $10 Million for Fraudulent Market Survey Data,” the headline read.

Victorson couldn’t believe it. Op4G, a market research company he first worked with more than a decade earlier, was being indicted for selling bogus data between 2014 and 2023. In fact, Victorson had just used them to run an online survey related to meditation as part of a U.S. National Institutes of Health project to create a standardized mindfulness metric. He didn’t yet know whether his own data were compromised, but he knew there was no way he’d be submitting his manuscripts with those data.

“Because they were within the period of the indictment, we scrapped them entirely,” Victorson said. “It took years off our lives.”

RFK Jr. questions another publisher on expression of concern for a vaccine paper

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

The U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services is once again questioning a publisher on an editorial action regarding a paper on vaccination.

Published in Sage Open Medicine in 2020, the article looks at health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Its authors are Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, both longtime vaccine critics.

Sage Open Medicine put an expression of concern on the paper on May 18. “The following article is under investigation,” it reads. “This expression of concern will remain in place until the investigation concludes, and a final decision has been made.”

A composer published a paper on theoretical physics. His lack of credentials drew criticism.

Some people compose music or make YouTube videos for a hobby. That’s Brandon Yates’ job — so in his spare time, he tries his hand at theoretical physics. But his only published paper was questioned because of his lack of professional training in the field — despite the physicist who inspired his work saying the work looks legitimate.

Based in Las Vegas, Yates earns a living as a composer for the animated series called “Death Battle.” He also has had an “intuitive understanding of, and love for, General Relativity for as long as I can remember,” he told Retraction Watch. But he has no formal training in physics and is self-taught, he said.

After watching a video lecture series online by Canadian physicist Eric Poisson, in January, Yates built a computer algebra program to look into rules in general relativity used to fuse two spacetimes across a thin shell, Yates said. By March, he had come across a conditional result he believed to be novel.

High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems

In July 2021, John Loadsman received a manuscript about a clinical trial that immediately roused his suspicion. Then the editor-in-chief of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Loadsman asked the authors for the raw data.

They weren’t pretty. “When I looked carefully at the spreadsheet, I could see entire blocks of data that were repeated,” recalled Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and scientific sleuth at the University of Sydney. “It was obvious that this was cooked.”

He rejected the manuscript, informing both the corresponding author, Reyhan Polat of the University of Health Sciences in Ankara and Etlik City Hospital, in Turkey, and her institution about his concerns. He also made a mental note to have a look at the researcher’s published work. Over the following years, that effort drew in another sleuth and eventually prompted inquiries into more than two dozen papers by a network of researchers in Turkey.

Celebrating Retraction Watch’s 16th birthday, how sweet it is

Suddenly, we’re 16. And what a year it has been.

Our birthday (and annual birthday post) comes on the heels of one of the biggest stories we’ve told this year: The unreported death of a 6-year-old girl whose parents paid more than $850,000 to a lab in China to develop a therapy for her rare genetic disorder. Seven days after getting the treatment, the young girl died.

Retraction Watch contributing writer Brendan Borrell spent countless hours seeking out experts in the field, chasing down documents and translations, and talking to the girl’s parents, who, after all they have been through, have one simple request: the retraction of a paper in Nature, in which the lab reports its preclinical results of the very therapy that caused their daughter’s death.

It’s an utterly heartbreaking and important story brought to light in collaboration with Science, which published the story on July 23. Just a few days later, the researchers’ university announced it would launch an investigation into the girl’s death. And a few days after that, Nature placed an editor’s note on the lab’s paper, saying it would be launching an investigation as well. The story has attracted international coverage by news outlets including the New York Post, Bloomberg, Times Higher Education, Southern Weekly and the South China Morning Post.

The story is one of more than 250 our team — Alicia Gallegos, Avery Orrall and Kate Travis, plus a small team of regular contributors — has reported in the last year. Some more highlights:

Weekend reads: University and journal investigating gene-editing death; ADA ‘must take accountability’; psychedelic therapy paper faces retraction

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal, university investigations launched into gene-editing death following Science-Retraction Watch reporting
Journal investigating apparent data mismatch in climate study
Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm
Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement
Just over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers
Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination
Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

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 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):

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.

The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.

Juan Pablo Alperin, a professor at Simon Fraser University and codirector of the Scholarly Communications Lab based in Vancouver, is represented by two attorneys who have had blockbuster success in FCA cases over the past decade. He and his attorneys originally filed the case under seal in March 2024. The government declined to intervene in the case on July 23 of this year, and a judge ordered the complaint unsealed, which now allows Alperin to pursue the case independently.

Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination

Raghabendra Kumar Mahato

A preprint server has withdrawn three papers by an author at the center of a Retraction Watch story revealing a prolific research factory operated through the WhatsApp messaging system.

Last week, we reported on Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student in Nepal, who runs an international research network that churns out conference abstracts and journal papers at a rapid-fire pace. Mahato’s network includes nearly 1,000 members connected through WhatsApp and produces suspected fast-churn science, while recruiting authorship for the works. Papers by the network have been accepted by major journals and presented at conferences by leading medical societies.

On July 24, Research Square, a preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts by Mahato due to concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network,” according to notices placed on the work. The notices include a link to Retraction Watch’s investigation.

Journal, university investigations launched into gene-editing death following Science-Retraction Watch reporting

Nature is investigating concerns surrounding a paper at the heart of a news story published last week on the death of a 6-year-old girl following a gene therapy treatment in China.

The paper, published in February by a team led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China, described preclinical work for a gene-editing treatment for Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder.

As we reported in collaboration with Science, the work was funded in part by the family of a 6-year-old girl with the condition. The family had approached Qiu based on work he had done with gene therapy for Rett syndrome, a disorder that also causes developmental delay. The parents ended up paying $860,000 to fund preclinical work for a gene-editing treatment for their daughter, who died of a severe immune reaction to the therapy seven days after receiving it.

Just over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers

Around 400 U.S. patents contain at least one citation to a retracted scientific paper, a new study has found.

The analysis, posted last month to the preprint server SSRN, analyzed granted patents in the United States in PatentsView, a database developed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) using artificial intelligence algorithms, and the Retraction Watch Database.

Of the more than 13 million patents in the USPTO database, 136,162 contained citations to at least one scientific paper. Of these, 401 patents cited retracted papers: 195 cited the retracted paper before it was filed, 92 cited papers retracted while being examined, and 114 cited a paper that was retracted after the patent was granted, the study revealed.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: