Retraction Watch

Tennessee researcher heads to court amid claims of theft, forgery and revenge

In May 2025, Tennessee authorities were preparing to arrest a university math professor for allegedly soliciting university donations from his students and pocketing the money.

Investigative records paint the picture of a professor who took financial and personal advantage of his students for years – from manipulating them into paying him rent to making them clean up after his dog – and grew vengeful when they spoke out about his alleged crimes.

As state investigators closed in, the professor, Don Hong, tried to get revenge against a student who reported him by accusing her of research misconduct and telling a journal to retract a study she recently authored, according to an investigative report from the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. When a grand jury indicted Hong on May 5, 2025, for theft and forgery, it tacked on a retaliation charge for his actions against the student.

Wiley investigating book chapter on biodiversity for fake references

While reading a chapter from a 2024 book on restoring biodiversity in post-industrial land earlier this month, an ecologist came across a reference to a study on rewilding she wanted to look up.

But the ecologist, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the chapter authors, couldn’t find a record of the 2020 paper, purportedly published in Ambio by “Knijn et al.” She decided to check the other references. She told Retraction Watch she found at least eight that didn’t exist.

The ecologist flagged the issue to the book’s publisher, Wiley, on September 7 but told us she never heard back, aside from an automated response.

Elsevier journal retracts 100+ papers for authorship issues, editor conflicts of interest

Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) has retracted 165 papers this year, most for “suspicious” changes in authorship or editorial conflicts of interest.

The retractions have come after STOTEN was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November after the index put it on hold due to concerns about article quality. The journal published over 10,000 articles in 2024; so far this year it has published fewer than 1,000.

The retractions, most of which were issued in August, applied to articles published from 2018 to 2025. At least 50 of the papers were handled by associate editors who had “an ongoing collaboration on a co-publication” or “an extensive record of collaboration” with the authors of the articles, according to the notices.

Misconduct case dropped against AI expert after claims of AI use in recent book

Sweden’s national committee on research misconduct has dismissed a case against an expert in the social ramifications of artificial intelligence following allegations her recent book contained hallucinated references and other signs of AI use.

The author, Virginia Dignum, a professor in responsible AI at Umeå University, denied references in her book The AI Paradox were fabricated and said she made “ordinary editing mistakes.”

Frank Drewes, head of the computing science department at Umeå University, told Retraction Watch the institution received a report containing the allegations from an anonymous individual on July 6 and referred the case to the National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (NPOF) in Uppsala, in accordance with Swedish regulation.

Weekend reads: An expression of concern for Nobel Prize winner; DOJ official queried journals on ‘partisan’ views; AI research’s ‘synthetic validity’ problem

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Diabetes association turmoil roils journal as group tries to thwart boycott
CEO of AI company loses paper on cognitive impact of generative AI
Lawsuit over retraction of abortion pill papers heads toward arbitration decision
Lancet union declares first-ever strike over staff wages
Paper mill studies get cited by clinical guidelines, policy docs and more, analysis finds

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 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):

Paper mill studies get cited by clinical guidelines, policy docs and more, analysis finds

Studies produced by a suspected paper mill are frequently cited in patents, clinical guidelines and policy documents, according to a new analysis.

The work, posted on arXiv on August 31, examined the fate of nearly 2,000 academic papers with one common factor: At least one coauthor lists the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network (PNN) as an institutional affiliation.

But there’s one problem: the PNN is not a real network of scientists. Instead, it’s an authorship-for-sale scheme, as Retraction Watch reported in 2022.

Lancet union declares first-ever strike over staff wages

Union members at The Lancet and its affiliated journals will go on strike Sept. 22 for one day with further action planned for the following week, after pay negotiations with parent publisher Elsevier fell apart, The Lancet’s union announced today.

The strike is the first in The Lancet’s 200-year history. Elsevier was ordered to recognize the union, a chapter of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), in September 2025, and their collective bargaining agreement was finalized in February. As part of the action the union, which represents 110 employees in various roles across several of The Lancet’s 30 journals, is also calling on members to refuse to work hours outside their contracted amount.

Negotiations on pay and support for workers began in March when the union asked for a 7.5% pay raise in the first year. According to an open letter from the union, workers’ pay had failed to keep up with inflation, leaving them “substantially worse off than they were five years ago despite their growing expertise and responsibilities.”

Lawsuit over retraction of abortion pill papers heads toward arbitration decision

A legal challenge by authors over three retracted articles about mifepristone is set for an arbitration conference this month as nationwide debate over the abortion pill heats up at the appellate level.

Ten researchers sued Sage in 2024 after the publisher retracted three of their papers about the purported dangers of mifepristone, a medication that ends early pregnancy. The authors alleged the company “applied inconsistent retraction standards” to their work based on Sage’s perception of their “pro-life affiliations,” in violation of California’s anti-discrimination law, according to their complaint.

The authors asked the Superior Court of California, County of Ventura to compel Sage into arbitration, as required by publishing agreements the researchers signed with the company. Arbitration is an alternative pathway for resolving disputes in which an arbitrator hears the parties’ arguments and issues a decision outside of the traditional court process.

Diabetes association turmoil roils journal as group tries to thwart boycott

A banner message on the *Diabetes Care* website tells visitors they “continue to actively accept and appropriately review all new and previously submitted manuscripts,” which contradicts a statement the journal’s editors posted last week announcing a boycott of ADA activities, including manuscript review.

Tensions between the American Diabetes Association and several editors of its flagship journal — who have boycotted the group over its handling of a protest at the association’s June conference — have again boiled over, this time on the website of the journal.

Steven Kahn, editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care and professor of medicine at the University of Washington, was one of five researchers ejected from the association’s June meeting in New Orleans for distributing copies of a Diabetes Care editorial on funding cuts outside the hall where National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to speak.

On Sept. 1, ADA announced the results of an independent review, which concluded the five attendees were removed because their actions violated the conference’s code of conduct, not because of the nature of the material they were distributing.

CEO of AI company loses paper on cognitive impact of generative AI

A psychology journal has retracted a paper on how using generative AI can affect confidence in work tasks after its sole author refused to share data with the editors.

The April paper, published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA), purported to describe the results of a survey of 1,923 adults recruited online to perform AI-assisted tasks. The paper was featured in an APA press release and articles in TIME and Futurism.

As we wrote in June, experts in the field began flagging issues with the paper’s data on PubPeer shortly after it was published. Sandra Grinschgl, who studies human-technology interaction at the University of Bern in Switzerland, was the first to do so, and later enlisted the help of colleagues Ian Hussey and Malte Elson. Their concerns included inconsistencies in graphs and results, study design, “erroneous” references and a lack of ethics approval.

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