Retraction Watch

A paper suggested a paleontologist’s fossil was forged. He wants it retracted.

An artist’s reconstruction of a mosasaur first described by Nicholas Longrich and colleagues in 2021.
*by Andrey Atuchin, 2020, in: N.R. Longrich et al/Cretaceous Research 2021*

Nicholas Longrich would like to set the record straight.

The paleontologist at the University of Bath in England and his colleagues described what they believed to be a new species of marine reptile in 2021, based on a Moroccan fossil found in a mine. But in 2024, another group of researchers questioned the fossil’s authenticity, pointing out the arrangement and orientation of its teeth “most likely result from forgery” based on published photos and documented alteration in other specimens from that region.

Late last year, Longrich and colleagues published CT scans of the original fossil as well as a new specimen of the species, saying it demonstrated their discovery was genuine. Longrich told us he sent the raw CT data confirming the sample “is authentic” to The Anatomical Record, which had published the critique, seeking an expression of concern or retraction of that paper.

Wildlife journal issues corrections for missing ethics statements

In what one sleuth called a “systemic failure,” a wildlife journal has issued corrections to a handful of papers not for an error in the articles but to include an item that wasn’t: ethics statements.

The most recent such correction in the European Journal of Wildlife Research (EJWR) was on September 8. According to the notice, authors of a March article on mammal diversity in Mexico provided additional information on the camera trapping method employed in the study — namely, that their research did not require approval from an animal ethics committee.

At least three other similar corrections have appeared in EJWR in the last four years, with several more articles with missing ethics statements flagged on PubPeer by commenter “Pseudotocinclus tietensis.” For example, for a 2021 paper on “understanding human controversies on the return of the wolf through the use of socio-cultural values,” which included a survey of nearly 1,500 people, Pseudotocinclus pointed out the ethics approval section for the paper says “Not applicable.”

Editor-in-chief resigns amid probes of alleged citation manipulation, data errors

The editor-in-chief of The Egyptian Rheumatologist has resigned following claims of questionable citation practices and improper peer review at the journal.

At least three publishers are also investigating alleged data errors in papers in other journals by the former journal editor, Tamer Gheita, and his research group. Gheita, a professor of rheumatology at Cairo University in Giza, has denied the claims, calling the complaints “subjective” and “malicious.”

The Egyptian Society of Rheumatic Diseases (ESRd) started investigating Gheita in June following concerns about his editorial practices at the society’s journal, including unusually rapid peer-review timelines and questionable citation patterns, according to Bassel Elzorkany, interim editor-in-chief for the journal. Elzorkany told Retraction Watch the ESRd board temporarily suspended Gheita, and Gheita resigned shortly afterward.

Weekend reads: China intensifies crackdown on misconduct; AI flooding medical journals with ‘meaningless’ research; Sham scientific societies

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal investigating paper on heart device with registration number for wrong trial
When open data are misused
‘Hot mess’ paper questioning CO2 and climate change gets retracted
Announcing the First Research Accountability Reporting Fellows: Our collaboration with The Open Notebook.

We’re honored to be the subject of a paper published this week: Retraction Watch is “a significant example of the long‐anticipated, but little‐realised, idea of watchdog science journalism,” Declan Fahy writes.

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 700, 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):

‘Hot mess’ paper questioning CO2 and climate change gets retracted

The paper refers to air temperature data as “obtained by NASA from satellites” and claims the main areas of warming depicted in this figure do “not fit in with the main industrial centers in the world!”
*S.A. Harris/Atmosphere 2023*

A paper that called into question many central data linking carbon dioxide to the rapidly warming climate has been retracted for “significant concerns,” including “unsupported conclusions” and “inaccuracies” in the interpretation of the data.

The paper, published in August 2023 in the MDPI journal Atmosphere, was written by Stuart Harris, a former geography professor at the University of Calgary. It has 26,000 views and was mentioned 869 times on the social media platform X, according to Altmetric. It was also covered by the climate skeptic website The Daily Sceptic. The article was cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

“It is a hot mess,” Marcus Sarofim, a climate scientist at Johns Hopkins University, told Retraction Watch. “I certainly don’t think this paper has any business being in the peer-reviewed literature.” He also pointed out the paper was submitted and accepted in under a month, saying the short timeframe “is always a bad sign.”

When open data are misused

*Credit: HALUSTD from Popspixel via Canva*

When Dorothy Bishop was asked to review a paper for a small neuroscience journal in August, she could tell from the abstract the authors had used a dataset she had first published four years ago on the public repository OpenNeuro. The dataset contained raw functional MRI scans from 50 participants, taken while they completed language-related tasks such as thinking of words and matching words to pictures.

“I was curious that somebody had already analyzed it, because it’s a hefty dataset that would have taken a lot of work to analyze,” Bishop, an emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, told Retraction Watch.

She quickly found problems in the manuscript. The description of the dataset didn’t match what she and her colleagues had actually done, and several references didn’t support the claims they were cited for. “There was clearly something seriously wrong,” she said. The editor was also suspicious, Bishop said, and the paper was eventually rejected. But Bishop believed the authors would try to publish the manuscript elsewhere, so she did a broader search of their names.

Journal investigating paper on heart device with registration number for wrong trial

The publisher of a European Heart Rhythm Association journal is investigating a paper that lists the incorrect registration number for a clinical study of a widely used but controversial heart implant.

The paper, published in EP Europace in May, described a prospective study of the Watchman FLX, from Boston Scientific, for a procedure called left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) in 400 people with abnormal heart rhythms. The authors concluded the device was “feasible, safe, and resource efficient, achieving high procedural success and low complication rates.”

Cardiologists have warned of caveats with the device and the LAAO procedure itself, mainly that early studies found LAAO caused a “significantly higher rate of a primary composite endpoint that included stroke, systemic embolism, cardiovascular/unexplained death, and major bleeding.” A study earlier this year found LAAO with a Watchman device increased rates of stroke and other complications when compared to oral medications.

Weekend reads: ‘The Weimar of knowledge’; ‘Could AI Be Better at Peer Review Than Humans?’; guidelines in South Korea ban hidden prompts, restrict AI use

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Misconduct case dropped against AI expert after claims of AI use in recent book
Elsevier journal retracts 100+ papers for authorship issues, editor conflicts of interest
Wiley investigating book chapter on biodiversity for fake references
Tennessee researcher heads to court amid claims of theft, forgery and revenge
Above and beyond: An editor wanted authors to know they’d been falsely cited

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):

Above and beyond: An editor wanted authors to know they’d been falsely cited

Like many college professors today, Sarah S. Richardson has seen AI-hallucinated citations in work submitted by her students. But she was surprised when an editor recently contacted her about a hallucinated citation involving her own work.

A March 31 email from the editor in chief of Disability Studies Quarterly explained Richardson was one of six scholars falsely cited in a journal article. The editor apologized for the error and alerted Richardson of the paper’s retraction.

“The editor took the extra step of informing all scholars who could have been harmed by the hallucinated citation[s] and did so in an exceptionally thoughtful and caring manner,” said Richardson, the Aramont Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. “I suspect that most hallucinated citations are never discovered, let alone redressed by a retraction and outreach to those affected.”

Tennessee researcher heads to court amid claims of theft, forgery and revenge

In May 2025, Tennessee authorities were preparing to arrest a university math professor for allegedly soliciting university donations from his students and pocketing the money.

Investigative records paint the picture of a professor who took financial and personal advantage of his students for years – from manipulating them into paying him rent to making them clean up after his dog – and grew vengeful when they spoke out about his alleged crimes.

As state investigators closed in, the professor, Don Hong, tried to get revenge against a student who reported him by accusing her of research misconduct and telling a journal to retract a study she recently authored, according to an investigative report from the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. When a grand jury indicted Hong on May 5, 2025, for theft and forgery, it tacked on a retaliation charge for his actions against the student.

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