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. 

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Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted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

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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. 

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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:

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):

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

‘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.

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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. 

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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.  

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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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Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity

In March, Thomas Harvey sat in on a talk at the American Physical Society’s summit in Denver on a new model of the universe that claimed to eliminate the need for dark matter and dark energy. William George, a fluid dynamicist who spent his career studying turbulence and an emeritus professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, gave the presentation. 

“It was very rambling,” said Harvey, a postdoc working in high energy theory at MIT, “and it was very clearly wrong.” 

After the talk, Harvey found George’s paper on the topic in Physics of Fluids. He decided to flag the problems he saw on PubPeer under a pseudonym, including errors in the math and misapplied principles of general relativity, and then sent a “polite email” to the editors. 

“That’s where it went very wrong,” Harvey said. 

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A company named Springer that isn’t the publisher is offering authorship for sale

The homepage for Springer Journals Online offers to “help you craft a manuscript that passes the demanding criteria of high impact journals.”

Computer scientist Richard Fateman got an email in August that was completely “out of the blue”: an offer of coauthorship in articles headed for publication in prestigious journals, in exchange for a fraction of the publication costs. 

Fateman, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, retired 18 years ago, so he was alarmed by the offer from a company called “Springer Journals Online.” He thought it was a scam or a phishing attempt to get money, he told Retraction Watch. 

He replied to the email, asking “‘are you for real?’” He also talked to his colleagues at Berkeley to ask if they had ever received similar offers. “I got a response from one or two people saying they’re not entirely surprised,” Fateman said. “And, ‘isn’t it a shame that this is going on?’”

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