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reads: Did a prof invent his own ‘Nobel Prize’?; former dean omits pharma ties; AI generated quotes found in now-retracted article on AI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reads: Did a prof invent his own ‘Nobel Prize’?; former dean omits pharma ties; AI generated quotes found in now-retracted article on AI

Publisher flags more than 120 papers three and a half years after learning of problems

What started as a small editorial conundrum several years ago has turned into an expression of concern for dozens of papers in a medical journal, thanks to the work of an Australian physician and scientific sleuth.

In February 2022, we wrote about the decision by publisher Wolters Kluwer to retract a table that was missing in a paper in Medicine. In the end the journal pulled the whole article, which described a protocol for a clinical trial, because its authors had “not responded to multiple requests.”

The story left one reader intrigued. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said John Loadsman of the University of Sydney, an anesthesiologist and journal editor. “I thought, I’ve got to have a look.”

Continue reading Publisher flags more than 120 papers three and a half years after learning of problems

Porn addiction recovery group sues publisher, UCLA researcher over critical paper

An online peer support group for people overcoming addiction to pornography has filed a lawsuit against the authors of a paper critical of the group, as well as the publisher Taylor & Francis, in an attempt to get the article retracted. 

The 2023 study, published in Deviant Behavior, found the Reddit channel for the group NoFap had a higher rate of posts containing violent language compared with two similar subreddits.

Study coauthors Nicole Prause, a bioinformatics programmer with the University of California, Los Angeles, and clinical psychologist David Ley are named defendants in the lawsuit, filed December 30. NoFap and the group’s founder, Alexander Rhodes, are plaintiffs in the suit, which alleges the authors manipulated the data to make the subreddit seem uniquely violent. 

Continue reading Porn addiction recovery group sues publisher, UCLA researcher over critical paper

Correction to a retraction highlights tortured phrases have been around longer than LLMs

Corrections to retractions have also been around longer than AI tools like the one that created this image. DALL-E

While large language models are taking the blame for hallucinations, punctuation and all manner of language choices these days, turns of phrase were being tortured well before the arrival of LLMs.

Overlooking that fact seems to have led to a recent correction to a retraction – yes, you read that right – in Sage’s Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology. The original article, published in February 2022, was on detecting coronary artery plaques. It contained several known tortured phrases, synonyms and rephrasings — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors.

For instance, the paper used the term “cardiovascular breakdown” for “heart failure”; “outward appearance acknowledgement” instead of “face recognition”; and “attractive resonance” for “magnetic resonance.” 

Continue reading Correction to a retraction highlights tortured phrases have been around longer than LLMs

Gynecologists in Italy collect more retractions and an expression of concern

A group of gynecologists in Italy has tallied yet another retraction, this time for an article with “significant overlap” with the methods, data and text of an older paper that shares two of the same authors. 

The paper, which involved research on a treatment for infertility, is the latest in a string of retractions for Sandro Gerli and Gian Carlo Di Renzo of the University of Perugia, and Vittorio Unfer, now at Saint Camillus International University of Health Sciences in Rome. Just a few weeks earlier, the researchers also received an expression of concern on a separate paper examining a widely used supplement for polycystic ovary syndrome. 

Commenters on PubPeer began to flag the researchers’ papers two years ago, and they now have 11 retractions among them, largely for duplicated data and text across the publications, as well as undisclosed conflicts of interest and unreliable study methods. In 2024, Di Renzo threatened legal action over a critic’s allegations about data duplications among several papers he coauthored — many of which have since been retracted. 

Continue reading Gynecologists in Italy collect more retractions and an expression of concern

Nature journal retracts two papers by immunology researchers for image duplication

A Nature journal has retracted a decades-old immunology paper that has been cited more than 1,000 times and, the author claims, spurred the development of new drugs.

 The paper on antibody diversity appeared in Nature Immunology in 2002. The article, cited 1,016 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, is the most cited work for corresponding author Andrea Cerutti, a professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain. 

The retraction comes on the heels of another retraction for Cerrutti, also for a paper in Nature Immunology. Both had been flagged on PubPeer for image issues. The authors maintain there was no misconduct.

Continue reading Nature journal retracts two papers by immunology researchers for image duplication

Weekend reads: CDC’s ‘unethical’ vaccine trial; The Lancet ‘refuses to retract’ letter; on the methods used to correct science

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 over 640, 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: CDC’s ‘unethical’ vaccine trial; The Lancet ‘refuses to retract’ letter; on the methods used to correct science

As journal’s retraction count nears 170, it enhances vetting 

A journal is implementing tighter controls for guest editors and peer reviewers after an investigation led to the retraction of more than 160 articles. 

As we reported last month, the American Society For Testing And Materials (ASTM) International started an investigation into its Journal of Testing and Evaluation after an ASTM vendor noticed some “irregular patterns in the peer review” of a special issue. The investigation revealed the peer review process in four special sections or issues had been compromised, resulting in the retraction of 147 articles.

The journal has since pulled 19 more papers, this time from a special section on human-centered artificial intelligence published in 2021.

Continue reading As journal’s retraction count nears 170, it enhances vetting 

Court challenge could chill reporting of research fraud, say whistleblower attorneys

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The U.S. government recently announced a record $6.8 billion in False Claims Act settlements and judgments in 2025, the most in a single year since the law’s enactment 163 years ago. For those concerned with scientific integrity, another significant FCA record was also set in 2025: the number of suits brought under the FCA by private individuals against entities they believe defrauded the federal government. 

Successful qui tam suits brought under the FCA can come with incentivizing monetary rewards – sometimes substantial – for the whistleblowers. Whistleblowers filed a record 1,297 of these so-called qui tam lawsuits in 2025, up from 979 suits in 2024. 

Despite the FCA’s banner year, legal experts say a pending challenge may weaken the law’s whistleblower power and impact. A Florida district court recently struck down the FCA’s qui tam provisions as unconstitutional because these suits involve individuals suing on behalf of the government. If an appeals court upholds the decision, some whistleblowers in that court’s jurisdiction may no longer get paid for exposing wrongdoing, a change that could allow more fraud to slip under the radar, legal analysts say.

Continue reading Court challenge could chill reporting of research fraud, say whistleblower attorneys

Guest post: The CDC hepatitis B study is unethical and must never be published

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The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), an international organization that establishes best practices for scholarly journals, has endorsed specific ethical standards for studies that involve vulnerable groups. Among these standards is this statement in the Declaration of Helsinki: “Reports of research not in accordance with this Declaration should not be accepted for publication.” The current controversy about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funding for a proposed study of hepatitis B vaccines in Guinea-Bissau must serve as a reminder of this core requirement of publication ethics.

An unsolicited $1.6 million grant to the Bandim Health Project at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) would randomly assign more than 14,000 newborns into two groups, those who would receive the vaccine at birth and those who would act as a control group with delayed vaccination. The purpose of the controversial study was to assess the “broader health effects” of the vaccine for the control group. 

But we already know the most critical health effect beyond the 48-months of the study: Withholding vaccination will predictably result in an increased incidence of liver disease later in life, including liver failure, cirrhosis and cancer. Therefore, the true scale of the tragedy brought on by this study would never be fully be known.

Continue reading Guest post: The CDC hepatitis B study is unethical and must never be published