Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: China fires researchers after death during trial; Critics question ‘baffling’ disease data; Retractions of old papers on the rise

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Diabetes association VP resigns over response to editorial boycott after protest at annual meeting
A year after plagiarism allegations and author’s retraction request, Elsevier is still investigating.
Misconduct cases remain unresolved for years in South Korea, data show
Do PubPeer comments make a difference? A study tried to find out

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 68,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 800, 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):

Do PubPeer comments make a difference? A small study tried to find out

PubPeer launched a new look on Nov. 9, including a dashboard showing the post-publication peer review platform has surpassed a half million comments in its 14 years of operation.

Also among the newly public statistics: 20,784 papers had comments on PubPeer before they were retracted, with a median of 10 months between the first comment and retraction. (According to the Retraction Watch Database, 59,843 papers have been retracted since PubPeer’s October 2012 launch.) More than 2,500 papers had comments a median of 11 months before an expression of concern, and 12,000 papers had discussion about them before a correction.

But what researchers think about the platform — and of scrutiny of their work — is harder to quantify. A group of researchers attempted to answer that question by contacting nearly 100,000 authors — over 10,000 of whom had comments about their papers on PubPeer and nearly 85,000 who cited a paper with comments. Less than 1% responded, the group reported in a preprint published earlier this year.

Misconduct cases remain unresolved for years in South Korea, data show

*The National Research Foundation of Korea in Daejeon.*

Misconduct inquiries in South Korea meant to be completed within months are taking years instead, according to data from the country’s primary agency for academic research.

Of the 83 misconduct cases the National Research Foundation has overseen since 2021, 49, including some still open, failed to reach a decision within the six-month deadline set by the Ministry of Education. Twenty two cases were open for longer than a year, and some had not progressed beyond the preliminary stages.

The foundation also wasn’t able to ascertain basic information for many cases. In more than half of all the cases, the agency couldn’t confirm when the preliminary inquiry began or ended. The politician who obtained the figures says the deadline has become meaningless and is calling for better oversight.

A year after plagiarism allegations and author’s retraction request, Elsevier is still investigating

At a glance, the papers look completely different: One, published in 2023, describes forest co-management in Bangladesh. The other, published last year, is about soil conservation in China. But an author on the older paper could tell something was amiss.

“Once I read it and saw the figures and methods were very similar with just a change in location and context, alarm bells rang,” agricultural researcher Lisa Lobry de Bruyn, of the University of New England, in New South Wales, Australia, told Retraction Watch.

The October 2025 article in Land Use Policy cited the earlier paper, published in Forest Policy and Economics and coauthored by de Bruyn and then-Ph.D. student Flora Begum. But some areas were “remarkably” similar, “such as methods and data presentation with artful alteration of axis and repositioning of themes,” de Bruyn wrote in a Dec. 2 email to editors at both journals. “But for the most part I cannot see how it could be that similar, coming to the same conclusions and same weightings of themes,” she said, calling the situation “distressing.”

Diabetes association VP resigns over response to editorial boycott following protest at annual meeting

The top publishing executive at the American Diabetes Association has resigned over how the organization has handled an editorial boycott at one of its journals following a protest at its annual meeting earlier this year.

Christian Kohler, vice president for professional publications, submitted his resignation on Nov. 6, “after considerable reflection and with profound disappointment in ADA’s handling of the events of June 5 in New Orleans, its subsequent responses to and justifications for those events, and its continued failure to articulate a credible path toward resolving the resulting crisis of confidence within the diabetes research community.”

Kohler has been with ADA for more than 20 years, according to his LinkedIn profile, and in his current role since 2022.

Weekend reads: Francesca Gino’s claims against Harvard dismissed; a brief history of scientific sleuths; China’s controversial trials slow

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Computing journal retracts 13 papers, including four from past EIC
Bioengineered retracts 119 more papers as investigation continues
A year later, Springer Nature journal hasn’t updated article with fake reference to our cofounder
U.S. university asks journal to remove professor’s name from paper with coauthor in China

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):

U.S. university asks journal to remove professor’s name from paper with coauthor in China

A physics journal has removed a professor’s name from an article at his university’s request, because a coauthor works at a university in China that has been flagged for national security concerns.

“The decision of the journal has been of course to consult the author,” Carlo Rovelli, the editor of Foundations of Physics, a Springer Nature title, told Retraction Watch. “As for the author, it was a problem to challenge his own university.“

The professor, Emanuele Zappala, an applied mathematician at Idaho State University, was the senior author on a paper, “Operational Protocols Cannot Certify Classicality,” that had been accepted for publication. His name is still listed on a preprint posted online last year.

A year later, Springer Nature journal hasn’t updated article with fake reference to our cofounder

Some people might happily take credit for an article in Nature they did not write. That’s not the case when the credited author is a cofounder of Retraction Watch and the attribution comes in a citation to an article that doesn’t exist.

The reference appeared in a November 2025 paper, published in DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, which criticized post-publication peer review platforms, specifically PubPeer, as vulnerable to “misuse” and “hyper-skepticism.”

Shortly after it was published, the article began to draw attention from users on — where else — PubPeer, where commenters flagged repetitive language, “essentially identical” paragraph structure, and five references that do not appear to exist, three with incorrect DOIs or links, and one with common authors that was retracted last year.

Bioengineered retracts 119 more papers as investigation continues

Bioengineered retracted 119 papers in October amid investigations into suspected paper mill activity and other integrity-related concerns at the Taylor & Francis journal.

Clarivate delisted Bioengineered from its Web of Science platform in May 2025, after placing it on hold a year earlier. In July 2025, the publisher suspended new submissions to the journal, which publishes bioengineering and biotechnology research, to focus on the investigations.

Concerns about paper mill activity date back to 2021, when the journal began investigating a spike in submissions and requests to change authorship after submission.

In the 2025 announcement, the publisher said it put an “under investigation” notice on over 1,000 articles.

Computing journal retracts 13 papers, including four from past EIC

An Elsevier journal on computer applications in biomedicine has retracted 13 papers — including four by a former editor-in-chief — for suspicious authorship changes and erroneous citations.

The articles were published in Computers in Biology and Medicine from 2019 to 2023. The October 15 retraction notices list suspicious changes in authorship, irrelevant citations to the work of authors and peer reviewers and self-plagiarism as reasons for retraction.

In 10 cases, the notice states, an “impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics advisor” requested the retraction.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: