Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: The LLMs ‘willing to commit academic fraud’; ‘peer replication’ instead of review; a ‘spam filter’ for predatory journals

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines
A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction
Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions
Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper
Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

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.

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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):

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleague couldn’t locate two references in a paper and asked for help, the librarian grew suspicious.

“These were recent references, which usually we have no problem finding,” Waite told us. “I looked at the issues of the journals where the article should have been, and there were completely different articles, so I immediately thought that the articles we had been asked to find were not real.”

The references were from an article exploring mental health integration after bowel diversion surgery published in Digestive Diseases and Sciences (DDS), a Springer Nature title.

Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper

Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some details of that story were familiar.

Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, discovered last September he was listed as an author on a commentary he had never seen before that had been published in the Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis. He immediately requested the journal remove the article, and, like our previous story, the journal demanded a fee to do so. But after a few exchanges, the journal just changed the author on the paper to a different name.

The Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis is one of 77 published by Walsh Medical Media. The publisher calls itself a “global leader” in open access publishing and, although it bills itself as a healthcare publishing company, has journals with specialties ranging from chemical engineering, coastal zone management, and intellectual property rights, as we have previously reported.

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.

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.

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines

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.

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:

Journal retracts GLP-1 study after researcher questions central finding
Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more
Heart researcher asked to attend remedial training after OSU misconduct finding, report reveals
Exclusive: Unrest at Wiley journal whose EIC is cited in more than half of its papers
Researcher ‘honestly shocked’ to discover name on paper, editor claims misunderstanding

Plus: Announcing the Retraction Watch Research Accountability Reporting Fellowship
And a job opening at the Medical Evidence Project

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):

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.”

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.

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.”

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