Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions

In a now-retracted paper, the authors report they found shocked quartz formed by an airburst from clouds of comet fragments that hit earth more than 12,000 years ago. Source

PLOS One has retracted two papers from the Comet Research Group, a controversial cadre of researchers who, according to their webpage, seek “to find evidence about comet impacts and raise awareness about them before your city is next.”

The same research group was also behind a September 2021 paper — published in Scientific Reports and covered by Retraction Watch here, here, and here — that claimed a cosmic airburst flattened the city of Tall el-Hammam 3,600 years ago, providing physical support for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The widely publicized paper was retracted last April after mounting concerns from outside researchers about the methodology, interpretations and data in the article. 

The group’s two new papers focus on different aspects of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which posits that a “disentangling comet” broke up in Earth’s atmosphere before plummeting to the ground, initiating a comet-driven cataclysm that leveled humans and mammoths and much else approximately 12,800 years ago.

Continue reading Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up. 

Continue reading A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines

Alachua County/Flickr

A preprint server has withdrawn a study that suggested children vaccinated in the second month of life are more likely to die soon after when compared to those who did not receive the vaccinations. 

The paper, posted at Preprints.org last December, was written by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker of Children’s Health Defense, a New Jersey-based nonprofit organization founded by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The group is known for anti-vaccination advocacy.

Jablonowski and Hooker conducted their analysis using a dataset provided by the Louisiana Department of Health. It included 1,775 children who died before turning 3 years old between 2013 and 2024 and had a record of being vaccinated. The preprint suggested children who received six recommended vaccinations in the second month of life were more likely to die in their third month compared to those who had not received the vaccinations. 

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Weekend reads: Institute to stop paying fees for some OA journals; sleuths’ tips for spotting fraud; Bayer sues J&J over ‘false and misleading claims’

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 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to nearly 650, and our mass resignations list has 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: Institute to stop paying fees for some OA journals; sleuths’ tips for spotting fraud; Bayer sues J&J over ‘false and misleading claims’

Researcher ‘honestly shocked’ to discover name on paper, editor claims misunderstanding

While reviewing her Google Scholar profile to prepare a list of her publications, psychologist Maryam Farhang came across a paper she didn’t recognize. 

The article, in the Journal of Research in Allied Life Sciences, included her name and affiliation, but Farhang hadn’t written or contributed to the paper in any way, she told Retraction Watch.

“I was honestly shocked and very concerned to see my name and affiliation used without my permission,” said Farhang, an associate research professor at Universidad de Las Américas in Chile. “This is not only unethical, but a serious breach of research integrity. As a researcher, authorship comes with responsibility, seeing my name attached to work that I neither wrote nor approved was professionally alarming and personally upsetting.”

Continue reading Researcher ‘honestly shocked’ to discover name on paper, editor claims misunderstanding

Exclusive: Unrest at Wiley journal whose EIC is cited in more than half of its papers

Timothy Lee of Macau University of Science and Technology was named editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Tourism Research in 2023.

On Feb. 18, a researcher in Italy sent a disgruntled email to the editorial board of a Wiley tourism journal. Salvatore Bimonte had waited more than a year for his manuscript to be peer-reviewed, he complained, and then months more while the editor-in-chief was “actively working on” the revised version Bimonte submitted. 

When Bimonte’s paper was finally rejected after 18 months — for reasons such as the topic not being “highly suitable” and the work not being submitted in the form of a case study — the researcher felt compelled to vent his frustration to the entire editorial board of the International Journal of Tourism Research (IJTR).

“Maybe, I would have been treated better if I had cited some of the editor in chief’s papers,” Bimonte, of the University of Siena, wrote in boldface in the email, which we have seen. Two days later, an unhappy editor at the journal quit, Retraction Watch has learned.

Continue reading Exclusive: Unrest at Wiley journal whose EIC is cited in more than half of its papers

Heart researcher asked to attend remedial training after OSU misconduct finding, report reveals

In a move one research ethics expert called “odd,” a university asked one of its professors to attend a remedial integrity course — despite their “significant concerns” the training would have any impact following findings of misconduct.

In 2024, Retraction Watch covered the case of Govindasamy Ilangovan, then an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at The Ohio State University. We reported at that time two of his papers were retracted from Heart and Circulatory Physiology at the request of the university, and that university officials had requested a third retraction. Thanks to a public records request, we now have access to the university’s 2023 final investigation report, which provides us much more information. 

The released material shows a committee of the university’s research integrity officers found Ilangovan responsible for manipulating images in three papers. OSU redacted the total number of images in question, but the investigators deemed it “very concerning.” 

Continue reading Heart researcher asked to attend remedial training after OSU misconduct finding, report reveals

Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

A screenshot of Louis’ LinkedIn profile before we reached out to him.

Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on our leaderboard. 

The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses. 

Louis – who also goes by Louis Hitler Muzong – did not respond to Retraction Watch’s requests for comment. Until recently, his LinkedIn page named him as a Ph.D. student in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, with an expected completion date of October 2027. But retraction notices for two papers say Louis requested his Leeds affiliation be removed. One states “the research described in the article is not associated with that institution,” and the other that the affiliation “was given incorrectly.” The University of Leeds did not respond to a request to verify whether he was a student there.

Continue reading Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

Journal retracts GLP-1 study after researcher questions central finding 

Image: iStock

After reading a recent study about GLP-1 treatment in the International Journal of Obesity, David B. Allison immediately became skeptical about the paper’s analysis. The article, published in May 2024, found people who combined a GLP-1 therapy with another weight loss drug lost more weight than patients on a GLP-1 therapy alone.  

“I could not really comprehend exactly what analysis they did,” Allison, chief of nutrition and director of the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told Retraction Watch. “And more so, I could not comprehend how the analysis they did would give results that would be informative of the conclusions they drew. So I was scratching my head a little bit.”

The IJO paper was a retrospective cohort study of adults with obesity who had been prescribed a GLP-1 therapy, specifically Saxenda and Ozempic. The study compared patients who received a GLP-1 alone with those receiving the GLP-1 therapy and then had bupropion/naltrexone added to their regimen. The Food and Drug Administration approved bupropion/naltrexone in 2014 for chronic weight management in obese adults. 

Continue reading Journal retracts GLP-1 study after researcher questions central finding 

Weekend reads: Did a prof invent his own ‘Nobel Prize’?; former dean omits pharma ties; AI generated quotes found in now-retracted article on AI

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 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to nearly 650, and our mass resignations list has 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: Did a prof invent his own ‘Nobel Prize’?; former dean omits pharma ties; AI generated quotes found in now-retracted article on AI