High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems

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In July 2021, John Loadsman received a manuscript about a clinical trial that immediately roused his suspicion. Then the editor-in-chief of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Loadsman asked the authors for the raw data.

They weren’t pretty. “When I looked carefully at the spreadsheet, I could see entire blocks of data that were repeated,” recalled Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and scientific sleuth at the University of Sydney. “It was obvious that this was cooked.”

He rejected the manuscript, informing both the corresponding author, Reyhan Polat of the University of Health Sciences in Ankara and Etlik City Hospital, in Turkey, and her institution about his concerns. He also made a mental note to have a look at the researcher’s published work. Over the following years, that effort drew in another sleuth and eventually prompted inquiries into more than two dozen papers by a network of researchers in Turkey.

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Celebrating Retraction Watch’s 16th birthday, how sweet it is

Suddenly, we’re 16. And what a year it has been. 

Our birthday (and annual birthday post) comes on the heels of one of the biggest stories we’ve told this year: The unreported death of a 6-year-old girl whose parents paid more than $850,000 to a lab in China to develop a therapy for her rare genetic disorder. Seven days after getting the treatment, the young girl died. 

Retraction Watch contributing writer Brendan Borrell spent countless hours seeking out experts in the field, chasing down documents and translations, and talking to the girl’s parents, who, after all they have been through, have one simple request: the retraction of a paper in Nature, in which the lab reports its preclinical results of the very therapy that caused their daughter’s death. 

It’s an utterly heartbreaking and important story brought to light in collaboration with Science, which published the story on July 23. Just a few days later, the researchers’ university announced it would launch an investigation into the girl’s death. And a few days after that, Nature placed an editor’s note on the lab’s paper, saying it would be launching an investigation as well. The story has attracted international coverage by news outlets including the New York Post, Bloomberg, Times Higher Education, Southern Weekly and the South China Morning Post. 

The story is one of more than 250 our team — Alicia Gallegos, Avery Orrall and Kate Travis, plus a small team of regular contributors — has reported in the last year. Some more highlights:

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Weekend reads: University and journal investigating gene-editing death; ADA ‘must take accountability’; psychedelic therapy paper faces retraction

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 66,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, 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):

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Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

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A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.  

The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles. 

Juan Pablo Alperin, a professor at Simon Fraser University and codirector of the Scholarly Communications Lab based in Vancouver, is represented by two attorneys who have had blockbuster success in FCA cases over the past decade. He and his attorneys originally filed the case under seal in March 2024. The government declined to intervene in the case on July 23 of this year, and a judge ordered the complaint unsealed, which now allows Alperin to pursue the case independently.

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Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination

Raghabendra Kumar Mahato

A preprint server has withdrawn three papers by an author at the center of a Retraction Watch story revealing a prolific research factory operated through the WhatsApp messaging system.  

Last week, we reported on Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student in Nepal, who runs an international research network that churns out conference abstracts and journal papers at a rapid-fire pace. Mahato’s network includes nearly 1,000 members connected through WhatsApp and produces suspected fast-churn science, while recruiting authorship for the works. Papers by the network have been accepted by major journals and presented at conferences by leading medical societies. 

On July 24, Research Square, a preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts by Mahato due to concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network,” according to notices placed on the work. The notices include a link to Retraction Watch’s investigation. 

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Journal, university investigations launched into gene-editing death following Science-Retraction Watch reporting

Nature is investigating concerns surrounding a paper at the heart of a news story published last week on the death of a 6-year-old girl following a gene therapy treatment in China.

The paper, published in February by a team led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China, described preclinical work for a gene-editing treatment for Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder. 

As we reported in collaboration with Science, the work was funded in part by the family of a 6-year-old girl with the condition. The family had approached Qiu based on work he had done with gene therapy for Rett syndrome, a disorder that also causes developmental delay. The parents ended up paying $860,000 to fund preclinical work for a gene-editing treatment for their daughter, who died of a severe immune reaction to the therapy seven days after receiving it. 

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Just over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers

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Around 400 U.S. patents contain at least one citation to a retracted scientific paper, a new study has found. 

The analysis, posted last month to the preprint server SSRN, analyzed granted patents in the United States in PatentsView, a database developed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) using artificial intelligence algorithms, and the Retraction Watch Database. 

Of the more than 13 million patents in the USPTO database, 136,162 contained citations to at least one scientific paper. Of these, 401 patents cited retracted papers: 195 cited the retracted paper before it was filed, 92 cited papers retracted while being examined, and 114 cited a paper that was retracted after the patent was granted, the study revealed. 

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Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement 

Images from the now-deleted dataset on Kaggle purportedly showed people who had a stroke, but the folder included stock images and photos of politicians and celebrities, as seen in this screenshot.

The online data repository Kaggle has removed a problematic dataset for violating intellectual property rights months after it was flagged by sleuths for containing celebrity photos and lacking information on data provenance or confirmed medical diagnoses. 

Researchers had used the images to train machine learning algorithms to detect stroke, but the dataset instead contained images of people with Bell’s palsy — as well as pictures of celebrities from movies and on the red carpet, as we reported in May. Adrian Barnett, a medical statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, flagged the dataset after discovering two others he and his colleagues investigated in a February preprint that showed signs of being fabricated. 

Using a reverse image search, Barnett matched four of the photos in the dataset, called “Facial droop and facial paralysis image,” to a paper published years earlier in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA). Only after prompting the journal to complain to Kaggle did the company take down the dataset. 

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Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday

In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself. 

But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.

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Journal investigating apparent data mismatch in climate study

A leading environmental economics journal is looking into claims that a 2025 study linking national innovation to lower carbon emissions contains data that does not match its source, after an expert in the field requested the paper be retracted. 

The article appeared in Ecological Economics, the journal for the International Society for Ecological Economics and published by Elsevier. The authors, three researchers at ESSCA School of Management in Lyon, claimed to draw on data from 229 countries between 2013 and 2020 and reported a negative relationship between a country’s “innovativeness” and its carbon dioxide emissions per capita. The paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

But three months after it was published, in October 2025, the journal began investigating anomalies in the dataset, although the authors maintain none of it was fabricated. In a letter to the journal’s editors requesting a retraction last October, seen by Retraction Watch, an academic with expertise in the field who reviewed the dataset said the paper had “serious data integrity concerns” and described a “clear case of research misconduct.” 

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