Editors resign from Springer immunology journal to launch nonprofit title

Several top editors of the Journal of Clinical Immunology, a Springer Nature title, have jumped ship to start a new, nonprofit journal with Rockefeller University Press. 

Jean-Laurent Casanova, the resigning coeditor-in-chief, told Retraction Watch the move followed pressure from Springer to publish more papers as the journal prepared to become fully open access. 

Editors from more than 20 other journals have taken similar actions in the past couple of years, as Retraction Watch has logged. Reasons for the walkouts vary, but editors often cite publishers’ perceived focus on paper quantity over quality

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Researcher removed from journal masthead, loses three more papers

Shalini Srivastava

A management journal has removed from its masthead an editor who was the subject of a Retraction Watch post last month.

Shalini Srivastava, a professor at the Jaipuria Institute of Management in India, was an associate editor at Employee Relations, an Emerald Publishing title. We reported last month that two articles she coauthored — one in Employee Relations and another in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, also an Emerald journal — were retracted because “a large portion of this article’s models, samples, and results are taken, without full and proper attribution, from” earlier work, both retraction notices read.

Following our report, Srivastava’s name disappeared from the editorial team page of Employee Relations. Asked to comment on the change, a spokesperson from Emerald’s research integrity department replied:

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‘The fraud was not subtle’: Chemist blames students after ten papers retracted

Suman L. Jain

While reviewing a manuscript for the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Caroline Kervarc-Genre and her colleague, Thibault Cantat, researchers at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, noticed something unusual. 

The nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra buried in the supplementary information had striking irregularities: The baseline was interrupted in some parts, and the noise was the same from one spectrum to the next. “Noise being inherently random, repeating noise is only possible if the spectra are altered [or] fake,” Kervarc-Genre told Retraction Watch

Starting to suspect something was wrong, she and Cantat, examined other papers by the lead author. They discovered data appeared to have been edited in several of the author’s latest publications. “The fraud was not subtle,” Kervarc-Genre said. 

She had never come across such blatant fraud, she said, and was unsure about what to do, so turned to PubPeer to report the findings. Others soon joined, uncovering more troubling patterns in the work. 

Continue reading ‘The fraud was not subtle’: Chemist blames students after ten papers retracted

Undisclosed conflicts, lightning-fast peer review: One Alzheimer’s journal’s role in a failed drug

Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the work of Charles Piller, an award-winning investigative reporter who has been covering problematic research in neuroscience and other fields for Science. We’re pleased to offer an excerpt of his new book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, which publishes today.


The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) seems authoritative and looks prestigious. Its sponsors are Springer, a division of Springer Nature, one of the largest scientific publishers, and the annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease Congress—a major, global scientific meeting. Many doctors rely on JPAD when deciding whether to prescribe amyloid-reducing drugs such as Leqembi, or others to fight agitation or anxiety that can accompany Alzheimer’s dementia.

Matthew Schrag first raised an eyebrow about the journal in August 2021 while examining possible misconduct in studies behind Cassava Sciences’ simufilam for the citizen petition to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The prior year, JPAD had published a paper by Cassava’s Lindsay Burns and Hoau-Yan Wang that suggested strong potential for the drug. It said simufilam lowered key biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s—particularly tau proteins—in the spinal fluid of patients who were volunteers for the company’s clinical trial. That paper helped boost confidence in Cassava and simufilam.

Continue reading Undisclosed conflicts, lightning-fast peer review: One Alzheimer’s journal’s role in a failed drug

Mass resignations hit psychotherapy journal after publisher replaced editors

The majority of the editorial board of a top psychology journal have resigned en masse after the publisher replaced the journal’s editors without warning. Also departing are the honorary editor and statistical consultants.

The journal, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, is a Karger title and “the official journal of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine and the World Federation for Psychotherapy,” according to its website

Christna Chap, head of editorial development for Karger, called the change in the journal’s leadership a “normal editorial transition” which “may have been misunderstood by some members of the community, leading them to criticize the journal and encourage others to do the same based on incorrect information.” 

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Weekend reads: ‘Invasion of the journal snatchers;’ our paper mill investigation; highly cited, highly retracted

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 55,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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: ‘Invasion of the journal snatchers;’ our paper mill investigation; highly cited, highly retracted

How academic leaders should respond to shock and awe

Eugenie Reich

The first weeks of the second Trump administration have brought unprecedented shock and awe to science. In response, the leaders of the scientific community must cease their hand-wringing and align behind two strong approaches to dealing with the chaos: protest and candor.

I write these words as an attorney representing whistleblowers of scientific fraud. Prior to law school, I was an investigative journalist focused on this same phenomenon. Today I represent scientists and technical experts independent of whether the falsified data they have uncovered support a political agenda. Twenty years of experience investigating, exposing and, when necessary, litigating cases of scientific fraud, has, however, led me to think in terms of a different kind of politics: the politics of nonconfirmatory data. Any research-based organization – a university, a healthcare provider, a laboratory or a corporation – faces a daily challenge from data gathered by scientists within that contradict the scientific hypotheses that are bringing in the money.

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Sage journal retracts another 400 papers

Sage has retracted 416 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), which had a mass retraction of over 450 papers last August. 

Before the mass retraction last year, which we covered, Sage paused publication of new articles from the journal, which it acquired when it bought IOS Press in 2023. The journal is now accepting new submissions, according to a Sage spokesperson. 

The retraction notice mentions citation and referencing “anomalies,” “incoherent, extraneous text and tortured phrases” and “unverifiable authors and reviewers,” among other signs of misconduct. “These indicators raise concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process underlying the following articles. The Publisher regrets that these were not flagged during the journal’s editorial and peer review processes,” the notice reads.

Most of the researchers are from universities in India and China. 

Continue reading Sage journal retracts another 400 papers

Former student was running a paper mill, says University of Manchester

Sameer Quazi

An English university has issued a finding of research misconduct against a former graduate student and is requesting 10 retractions of his published work, which they say bears the marks of being papermilled. 

The former student, Sameer Quazi, was enrolled at the University of Manchester in 2021 in the school’s “PGCert” program in clinical bioinformatics, according to his LinkedIn profile. The certificate program sits between undergraduate and masters training. Quazi’s profile states he is currently enrolled in a master’s program in biomedical sciences at Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge. (Update, 2/3/25: Ruskin tells us he is no longer enrolled there, and as of today his LinkedIn profile says he left there this month.)

According to a January 30 statement from the university

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Anatomy of a retraction: When cleaning up the literature takes six years

Dario Alessi

In 2018, a biochemist in Scotland became aware of image irregularities in two of his papers through comments on PubPeer, each in a different journal. The researcher, Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee, said he alerted his home institution immediately.

In July and October 2024, the papers were retracted.

Emails obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request show what happened in the intervening six years: Consecutive investigations by Dundee and a funder, then delays as the journals juggled conflicting narratives. In the meantime, the papers continued racking up citations.

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