Retraction Watch

Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage

In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.

In February, Evgenios Agathokleous, an environmental resources researcher at Nanjing University in China, asked Prime Scholars’ European Journal of Experimental Biology to retract a 2023 article that listed him as the sole author. In his email to the journal, he said he had never seen the paper and asked the journal to remove it and publish a formal retraction notice.

Two days later, a Prime Scholars representative named Nina responded, telling Agathokleous “your article has already been successfully published in our journal in accordance with the company’s publication norms and policies.” Nina then asked Agathokleous to pay 519 euros, the equivalent of roughly $600, which they said “covers the costs associated with publication handling, indexing preparation, and database maintenance.”

BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’

The BMJ has retracted a paper on stem cell therapy for heart failure after sleuths flagged the work for “serious” inconsistencies in data.

Published in October, the paper reported the results of a phase III clinical trial of more than 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, looking at whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack. The journal announced the results in a press release, and news of the findings appeared in several outlets. New Scientist called the study the “strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself.”

A week after the study was published, sleuths took to PubPeer to point out inconsistencies between the data reported in the article and the dataset uploaded with it. The concerns included a “curious repeating pattern” of records in the dataset and a high number of integers for the height and weight of patients.

Jury to decide whether Duke retaliated against researcher who reported sexual harassment

A jury will soon decide whether leaders at Duke University accused a researcher of misconduct in retaliation for her reporting sexual harassment at the institution.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick Auld ruled Brahmajothi Mulugu provided enough evidence to show the timing of Duke’s misconduct investigation against her may have been retaliatory, allowing Mulugu’s legal challenge to proceed. In his Jan. 16 decision, Auld denied a motion by Duke to end the lawsuit, concluding a jury should weigh whether Mulugu’s sexual harassment report fueled the university’s misconduct actions against the scientist.

Mulugu, an immunologist in Duke’s Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, sued the university in 2023, alleging leaders conducted an “unjustified” research misconduct investigation after she reported sexual harassment by then-professor Mohamed Bahie Abou-Donia. The university’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) substantiated Mulugu’s harassment report in November 2020, and Abou-Donia resigned, according to a case summary in Auld’s decision.

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?

A few months ago, when Elle O’Brien, a data scientist at the University of Michigan, was checking who had recently cited her work on Google Scholar, she came across something that would take her and her colleagues down “a rabbit hole.”

When O’Brien opened a publication that had recently cited her, it appeared to be a rewritten version of an arXiv preprint she had co-authored with two colleagues, Grischa Liebel and Sebastian Baltes. Yet this did not seem to be a simple case of theft by other academics.

For starters, the six authors listed on the fake article didn’t exist, although three had been given the same institutional affiliations as O’Brien, Liebel, and Baltes: the University of Michigan, Reykjavik University and Heidelberg University, respectively. The similarities in the texts read as if someone had typed, “ChatGPT, please rephrase this paper without changing anything else,” Liebel wrote in a post on LinkedIn. But why would fake authors need publications?

Weekend reads: ‘Illicit AI use’ in hundreds of peer reviews; 49-year-old commentary on talc retracted; co-authorship as a ‘traded commodity’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Physicists flag over 50 papers on superheavy elements, leading to 3 retractions
Guest post: A call to end the ‘impact on conclusions’ test for retraction
Publisher to retract entire conference proceedings, ban editor who wrote most of them
The Lancet retracts half-century-old commentary on talc for undisclosed industry ties
Judge upholds 15-year debarment against scientist who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch
Why don’t journalists circle back to cover retractions? A conversation with Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson

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 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.

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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):

Why don’t journalists circle back to cover retractions? A conversation with Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Documentation, a team of researchers in journalism, social science and data explore how and why journalists report – or don’t report – on scientific retractions.

The investigators performed an analysis on news coverage of “high-attention retracted articles” identified from the Retraction Watch database and other sources and also interviewed journalists from the U.K. and Finland to gain a cross-cultural perspective.

The lead author of the paper, Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson, of the University of Sheffield’s School of Information, Journalism and Communication, took questions from us about the work.

Judge upholds 15-year debarment against scientist who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch

An appeals judge has recommended the U.S. Health and Human Services uphold a proposed 15-year debarment for a scientist accused of research misconduct more than a decade ago.

In a May 2025 decision, administrative law judge (ALJ) Margaret G. Brakebusch concluded that “undisputed facts” establish Ariel Fernández engaged in research misconduct by falsifying research results in published papers, grant applications and other materials while serving as a professor at Rice University in Houston. Brakebusch recommended HHS affirm the proposed sanctions made by the Office of Research Integrity in a 2022 charging letter — including a 15-year ban from federal funding for Fernández, an Argentine chemist.

The development is the latest in a lengthy saga involving skepticism over Fernández’s work dating back to 2009. Over the years, scientists have criticized his work, journals have investigated his papers, and Fernández has flip-flopped about the funding sources for some of his articles. Fernández also levied a legal threat against Retraction Watch in the past for reporting on an expression of concern in one of his papers.

The Lancet retracts half-century-old unsigned commentary on talc for undisclosed industry ties

The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products.

The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defense attorneys to claim scientific proof of talc products’ safety, according to critics. But one such attorney says the paper “would not be relied upon to any significant degree.”

Published in 1977, the article argued against government-mandated regulatory testing for asbestos in cosmetic talc. Around that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering such monitoring, a task that ultimately became the responsibility of cosmetics companies.

Publisher to retract entire conference proceedings, ban editor who wrote most of them

*EPJ Web of Conferences* will retract the entire volume of conference proceedings for ICEMR 2025.

On Monday, we published a story about a physicist in India who had three papers on superheavy elements retracted after others in his field began flagging his work. Hours later, a publisher decided to retract an entire volume of conference proceedings after one of the critics pointed out the researcher, H.C. Manjunatha, was responsible for the majority of its contents.

Manjunatha is listed as coordinator of the International Conference on Emerging Frontiers in Material Science and Radiation Physics, which took place in December. Manjunatha was one of four editors for the conference’s proceedings published in EPJ Web of Conferences on March 18. Of the 55 articles in the volume, Manjunatha is an author on 32.

David Boilley, a physicist at the University of Caen Normandy and researcher at GANIL, emailed EDP Sciences, which publishes EPJ Web of Conferences, on March 22 noting Manjunatha’s position as editor and the large number of papers he authored in the volume. Boilley, whom we interviewed for our story, mentioned the forthcoming article to the journal and also included a copy of his recent preprint calling out Manjunatha’s papers.

Guest post: A call to end the ‘impact on conclusions’ test for retraction

The Ship of Theseus paradox asks, if you replace all the wood in a ship, is it still the same ship? Likewise, is it possible to change all the facts inside an article without altering its conclusions? *Wikimedia Commons*

As a lawyer representing whistleblowers of problems in the scientific literature, I follow the arc of many fierce disputes over potentially flawed research articles. I was intrigued to see last year that the National Academies had convened a Committee on Corrections and Retractions to take on the question of “recommending improvements to the processes used to correct errors in scientific articles.” The group is nearing the end of its work.

One of the most important issues that I hope the committee will address is the pervasive “impact on conclusions” test. This is the idea that the authors of a challenged article can make as many post-publication corrections to their methods or data as they like, as long as these have no impact on their conclusions. Indeed COPE guidance states that “retraction might not be appropriate” if “correction would sufficiently deal with the errors or concerns raised, provided that the main results and conclusions are not unduly affected by the correction.”

This focus on conclusions reminds me of the Ship of Theseus paradox. If the ancient Athenians were able to replace all the wood in the ship of their hero without changing its identity as the Ship of Theseus, is it possible to change all the facts inside an article without altering its conclusions?

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