Paper touted by MD Anderson gets expression of concern for data ‘concerns’

A 2025 paper identified a protein (stained in brown) that plays a role in bone metastases.
Image courtesy of Li Ma via MD Anderson

Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern over “a series” of data concerns in a paper lauded by MD Anderson Cancer Center last year for identifying “a new driver” of bone metastasis.

The article, published in May 2025, has been the subject of a long and growing thread on PubPeer since April, where critics have been raising concerns about numerous images that appear to have been duplicated. The majority of the paper’s 22 authors are affiliated with MD Anderson in Houston, with at least two authors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

In June, the journal issued a correction to the paper, stating the authors “identified errors” during cross-checking of the original data, including incorrect and misplaced images.  

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Former Crick Ph.D. student loses COVID vaccine paper for fabrication

Science Translational Medicine has retracted a paper on COVID-19 vaccines after an institutional investigation revealed a former Ph.D. student fabricated data and falsified images in the article. The retraction is the former student’s second for fabrication this year. 

The July 2022 article looked at whether a vaccine targeting a particular part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could help defend against a wider range of COVID-19 variants in mice. It has been cited 83 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

According to the October 14 retraction notice, lead author Kevin Ng, formerly a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London, was responsible for fabricated data in one of the figures and falsifying images in another. Ng admitted responsibility for the fabrication during the editorial investigation, the notice states, which “casts doubt on some other experiments presented in the paper, for which primary data and samples are unavailable, precluding post hoc verification.” 

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Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity

In March, Thomas Harvey sat in on a talk at the American Physical Society’s summit in Denver on a new model of the universe that claimed to eliminate the need for dark matter and dark energy. William George, a fluid dynamicist who spent his career studying turbulence and an emeritus professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, gave the presentation. 

“It was very rambling,” said Harvey, a postdoc working in high energy theory at MIT, “and it was very clearly wrong.” 

After the talk, Harvey found George’s paper on the topic in Physics of Fluids. He decided to flag the problems he saw on PubPeer under a pseudonym, including errors in the math and misapplied principles of general relativity, and then sent a “polite email” to the editors. 

“That’s where it went very wrong,” Harvey said. 

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A company named Springer that isn’t the publisher is offering authorship for sale

The homepage for Springer Journals Online offers to “help you craft a manuscript that passes the demanding criteria of high impact journals.”

Computer scientist Richard Fateman got an email in August that was completely “out of the blue”: an offer of coauthorship in articles headed for publication in prestigious journals, in exchange for a fraction of the publication costs. 

Fateman, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, retired 18 years ago, so he was alarmed by the offer from a company called “Springer Journals Online.” He thought it was a scam or a phishing attempt to get money, he told Retraction Watch. 

He replied to the email, asking “‘are you for real?’” He also talked to his colleagues at Berkeley to ask if they had ever received similar offers. “I got a response from one or two people saying they’re not entirely surprised,” Fateman said. “And, ‘isn’t it a shame that this is going on?’”

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Weekend reads: OpenAI’s preprint dump; Taylor & Francis to leave Informa; arXiv’s preprint cap

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 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.

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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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: OpenAI’s preprint dump; Taylor & Francis to leave Informa; arXiv’s preprint cap

‘Cerebral torment’: IOP retracts nearly 100 conference papers for tortured phrases

IOP Publishing has retracted nearly 100 papers from three of its conference proceedings after the articles were flagged for containing tortured phrases. 

Tortured phrases are rephrasings and synonyms — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors. For example, one of the retracted papers described “savvy lattices” and “shrewd homes” instead of “smart grids” and “smart homes.” Tortured phrases pre-date AI technology. 

The recent batch includes 29 retractions from Journal of Physics: Conference Series; eight from Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science; and 43 from Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. 

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OpenAI withdraws three preprints a day after releasing 722 manuscripts on unsolved math problems

Less than 24 hours after OpenAI posted over 700 preprints describing major math results by an internal AI model, the company has withdrawn three of the manuscripts for errors. 

On Oct. 6, OpenAI published 722 preprints in a GitHub repository about purported progress in solving 372 math problems in geometry, computer science, algebra and other subjects. The company called the release an effort “to push the frontier of human knowledge and enable further progress in mathematics.” 

But on Oct. 7, OpenAI announced the withdrawal of three manuscripts because of a sign error. The error invalidated an argument in one manuscript and the construction used by two dependent papers, according to the announcement. Each of the withdrawn papers carry notices explaining “the gap,” and that OpenAI has “revised 14 other manuscripts with proof repairs, corrected statements, clearer hypotheses and dependencies, and one correction to an obsolete citation.” 

That an error cascaded into three of the OpenAI manuscripts is not surprising, said Alex Townsend, an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca. He suspects there will be more errors found, he said. 

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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. 

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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.” 

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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. 

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