Retraction Watch

U.S. university asks journal to remove professor’s name from paper with coauthor in China

A physics journal has removed a professor’s name from an article at his university’s request, because a coauthor works at a university in China that has been flagged for national security concerns.

“The decision of the journal has been of course to consult the author,” Carlo Rovelli, the editor of Foundations of Physics, a Springer Nature title, told Retraction Watch. “As for the author, it was a problem to challenge his own university.“

The professor, Emanuele Zappala, an applied mathematician at Idaho State University, was the senior author on a paper, “Operational Protocols Cannot Certify Classicality,” that had been accepted for publication. His name is still listed on a preprint posted online last year.

A year later, Springer Nature journal hasn’t updated article with fake reference to our cofounder

Some people might happily take credit for an article in Nature they did not write. That’s not the case when the credited author is a cofounder of Retraction Watch and the attribution comes in a citation to an article that doesn’t exist.

The reference appeared in a November 2025 paper, published in DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, which criticized post-publication peer review platforms, specifically PubPeer, as vulnerable to “misuse” and “hyper-skepticism.”

Shortly after it was published, the article began to draw attention from users on — where else — PubPeer, where commenters flagged repetitive language, “essentially identical” paragraph structure, and five references that do not appear to exist, three with incorrect DOIs or links, and one with common authors that was retracted last year.

Bioengineered retracts 119 more papers as investigation continues

Bioengineered retracted 119 papers in October amid investigations into suspected paper mill activity and other integrity-related concerns at the Taylor & Francis journal.

Clarivate delisted Bioengineered from its Web of Science platform in May 2025, after placing it on hold a year earlier. In July 2025, the publisher suspended new submissions to the journal, which publishes bioengineering and biotechnology research, to focus on the investigations.

Concerns about paper mill activity date back to 2021, when the journal began investigating a spike in submissions and requests to change authorship after submission.

In the 2025 announcement, the publisher said it put an “under investigation” notice on over 1,000 articles.

Computing journal retracts 13 papers, including four from past EIC

An Elsevier journal on computer applications in biomedicine has retracted 13 papers — including four by a former editor-in-chief — for suspicious authorship changes and erroneous citations.

The articles were published in Computers in Biology and Medicine from 2019 to 2023. The October 15 retraction notices list suspicious changes in authorship, irrelevant citations to the work of authors and peer reviewers and self-plagiarism as reasons for retraction.

In 10 cases, the notice states, an “impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics advisor” requested the retraction.

Weekend reads: Mega-journal on hold at PubMed; 1,400 retractions in one day; ‘I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Another Sydney investigation of astrophysicist leads to retractions
Game theory society yanks support for journal after Elsevier fails to renew EIC contract
Federal U.S. judge tosses $1 billion defamation lawsuit against Elsevier
Springer Nature journal could lose registry standing for clearing author of duplication
Scientific Reports on hold in PubMed while NLM reevaluates journal

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 68,000 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):

Scientific Reports on hold in PubMed while NLM reevaluates journal

The National Library of Medicine has stopped indexing articles from Scientific Reports in MEDLINE because the journal’s inclusion in the world’s largest biomedical library is under review, Retraction Watch has learned.

“Following its significant growth in recent years, Scientific Reports is currently being reviewed by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM),” the journal’s chief editor Rafal Marszalek wrote in an Oct. 20 email we have seen. “We have been informed that during this period, indexing of newly published content in MEDLINE and archiving in PubMed Central (PMC) are paused, and will not appear in PubMed.”

Marszalek did not say why NLM is reviewing Scientific Reports, which is the largest journal in PubMed in terms of articles indexed. But according to MEDLINE’s policies page, NLM re-evaluates journals if “there are significant changes to a journal,” noting the library monitors journals “for changes in publication practices, such as annual publication volume or primary article content types.”

Springer Nature journal could lose registry standing for clearing author of duplication

A Springer Nature journal’s failure to find duplication in two papers by the same author could cost its official recognition as a scholarly publication in Norway.

The national register in Norway that decides which journals count toward academics’ publication records has concluded there is “no doubt” of duplication between two papers, which appear to use the same student survey. The ruling comes more than a year after Springer Nature, publisher of one of the journals, Innovative Higher Education, investigated the same issue and cleared the author.

Both papers were written by Artur Strzelecki of the University of Economics in Katowice, Poland, who denies there was any wrongdoing. Springer Nature told Retraction Watch it would consider the assessment from Norway, which it said was not available when the journal’s editors investigated.

Federal U.S. judge tosses $1 billion defamation lawsuit against Elsevier

A district judge has ended a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier over a study about air purification technology after concluding the plaintiff’s evidence was too weak to take to trial.

Global Plasma Solutions, which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a paper in Building and Environment about the company’s needlepoint bipolar ionization technology. GPS claimed Elsevier was responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that led to “massive” financial losses for the company, according to its complaint. GPS, which now goes by GPS Air, claimed Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” but still published the paper.

On Oct. 22, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina tossed out the suit. Judge Kenneth Bell wrote in his order there was “insufficient evidence” for a jury to conclude Elsevier acted with malice. “Actual malice” requires a plaintiff to prove the alleged defamatory statement was made with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard,” which GPS could not support, according to Bell.

Game theory society yanks support for journal after Elsevier fails to renew EIC contract

The Game Theory Society is severing ties with one of its official journals. The move comes two months after the journal’s editors resigned because Elsevier failed to renew the contract for the journal’s editor-in-chief.

The society released a statement on October 9 announcing it will “withdraw its support for and end its association with” Games and Economic Behavior effective November 15.

“Our decision follows Elsevier’s decision not to renew Hervé Moulin’s contract and its subsequent search for new editors without the involvement of the existing editorial board,” the statement says. As we reported in August, Moulin, a business professor of the University of Glasgow, said the publisher “crossed a fundamental red line in the good faith agreement between the Editorial Board and the publisher” by not consulting with the editorial board regarding future editorial appointments. A spokesperson for Elsevier said the publisher asked the board members and Moulin for feedback but did not receive responses.

Another Sydney investigation of astrophysicist leads to retractions

A 2014 paper has been retracted following an investigation that concluded several of the figures, including those shown here, were “likely fabricated.”
*J.M. Schmidt et al./JGR: Space Physics 2014*

The University of Sydney has once again investigated the work of a former research fellow in its physics department, this time resulting in the retraction of two papers over concerns that data in several figures were likely fabricated.

In September, the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics retracted two articles by Joachim Schmidt, who was at the University of Sydney from 2010 to 2021.

As Retraction Watch reported in 2023, the university previously investigated work from Schmidt and his supervising professor, Iver Cairns. Researchers at the University of Michigan had raised concerns about a figure in a draft manuscript supposedly created using a simulation model developed by the Michigan team. Sydney’s investigation found Schmidt had used Adobe Photoshop to create or alter the images, which could not be reproduced by digital forensic experts or by Schimdt himself.

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