Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him

Mohd Asif Shah

On May 9, a university administrator in Afghanistan threatened in a LinkedIn post to expose what he called a publishing scam by private universities in India.

“These institutions contact academicians globally, promising payment for publishing research papers that will boost their national and international rankings,” Mohd Asif Shah, dean of the faculty of economics at Kardan University in Kabul, alleged.

The following day, Shah elaborated in a new post: “Four years ago, Woxsen University asked me to publish papers and file patents under their affiliation. I agreed, delivered, and they proudly displayed those publications on their website. Now, after four years, they are denying payment for that work.” He also complained his “patent incentives were being unilaterally reduced” from 40,000 Indian rupees (US$420) to 17,500 rupees (US$184) per patent — “a reduction of over 56%.”

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Publisher investigating two more papers on glyphosate safety over ghostwriting claims

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Tayor & Francis is investigating two papers about the weed killer Roundup following claims the articles were ghostwritten by the company that developed the herbicide.

The review comes after an Elsevier journal last year retracted a paper about Roundup linked to court documents that revealed company employees wrote the article but were not named as coauthors. Authors of the two latest papers under scrutiny stand by their work and deny any ghostwriting occurred.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is highly contentious, with critics arguing the substance is carcinogenic and supporters contending the chemical is safe. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing whether states can hold companies liable for failing to include cancer warnings on products containing the substance. 

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Weekend reads: Uneven sanctions for misconduct; protein name confusion in hundreds of papers; the Journal of Research on Research

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 65,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Uneven sanctions for misconduct; protein name confusion in hundreds of papers; the Journal of Research on Research

Science flags paper that found AI chatbots help debunk conspiracy theories 

Science has issued an expression of concern for a highly publicized study looking into whether conversations with AI chatbots could convince conspiracy theorists to abandon their beliefs. The move came after the authors of the paper found inconsistencies in their dataset, but a reanalysis shows the findings still stand, they say. 

The September 2024 article found conversing with an AI chatbot called DebunkBot reduced people’s belief in a particular conspiracy theory by an average of 20%. The research was featured in news stories in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. 

This February, the authors — Thomas Costello of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University in New York and cognitive scientist David Rand at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, for the work. It has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

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New system for flagging retracted papers finds scores of them in Cochrane reviews

Cochrane has implemented a new system for checking whether any of its thousands of published reviews include retracted studies in their analyses, the organization announced today. The effort already has turned up dozens of reviews that do and will now get closer scrutiny to ensure their results and recommendations hold up.

Cochrane publishes systematic reviews on health-related topics that evaluate the strength of evidence on particular treatments and interventions. Professional organizations and policymakers use the more than 9,500 reviews when developing recommendations. Recently a study of anesthesia clinical trials found a high rate of the studies with faked or flawed data, and another revealed that retracted studies included in systematic reviews — 17% of which were Cochrane reviews — had a large impact on clinical guidelines derived from them. 

Last year, Cochrane rolled out a feature in its database of reports of clinical trials, called CENTRAL, to flag retracted studies. The publisher pulls data on retracted papers from the Retraction Watch Database, via CrossRef. Now, they have extended the process to routinely identify systematic reviews that rely on retracted papers.

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Journal retracts depression treatment study with findings called ‘too good to be true’

In the fall of 2024, Matt Williams was grading papers at Massey University in New Zealand when he noticed something off in a study one of his students had cited.

The study, published in 2016, reported overwhelming evidence suggesting that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is an effective treatment for depression. But the roughly 85% drop in symptoms of depression linked to the therapy struck Williams as implausible. 

“That’s way too big to have that kind of effect,” Williams recalled thinking as his first impression of the study. “Because I love to procrastinate instead of continuing marking, I then looked up the paper and started reading it.”

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Court dismisses biochemist’s lawsuit against MD Anderson

Credit: 12963734/iStock

A Texas court has dismissed a lawsuit by a biochemist accused of research misconduct who claimed her former institution violated her due process rights during its investigation. 

Sonia Melo sued The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2025, alleging the institution failed to follow its policies during a misconduct investigation into her work. MD Anderson found in May 2024 Melo had engaged in research misconduct while a postdoctoral fellow between 2012 and 2014, according to court documents.

Attorneys for MD Anderson requested a judge dismiss the suit in February, arguing the institution is a governmental entity entitled to sovereign immunity that protects it from lawsuits seeking money. Under Texas law, public hospitals are shielded from most suits by immunity rules. Some loopholes for medical negligence exist, such as when medical equipment harms patients. 

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Weekend reads: Moffitt executive steps down following probe; a hijab-switching scandal; NSF’s watchdog unit empty 

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 65,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Moffitt executive steps down following probe; a hijab-switching scandal; NSF’s watchdog unit empty 

Editors of semantics journal resign, launch new journal after publisher ‘ultimatum’

The new journal, Semantics of Natural Languages, launched in May.

The editors of a semantics journal owned by Springer Nature have resigned to launch a new one, citing pressure from the company to increase their annual publication volume by 25%. 

The editor-in-chief and the two associate editors Natural Language Semantics resigned from the journal in early April, editor-in-chief Amy Rose Deal, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Retraction Watch. They resigned in consultation with the 25-member editorial board, which gave “a very high level of support for the move,” Deal said.

In a May 19 open letter, the three resigning editors and the founding co-editors of Natural Language Semantics announced the launch of their new journal, Semantics of Natural Languages. The new journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities, an open-access publisher whose goal “is to liberate university research from commercial control,” according to its website.  

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Journal retracts study linking hepatitis vaccine to autism that was included in CDC review

A toxicology journal has retracted a 16-year-old study linking hepatitis B vaccines to autism in children following an independent statistical review that found a half-dozen concerns with the study’s methodology.  

Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, the authors claimed boys vaccinated in their first month of life had “threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis” than those vaccinated later or not at all. 

The study was included in a rapid systematic review of hep B vaccine studies presented by John Su, director of the Immunization Safety Office for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the Sept. 18 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.  It resurfaced in a presentation at the Dec. 4 ACIP meeting, just before the committee’s decision to no longer recommend that infants receive the hep B vaccine at birth if the mother tests negative for the virus. 

Continue reading Journal retracts study linking hepatitis vaccine to autism that was included in CDC review