Reviewer finds ‘top pharmaceutical scientist’ has a self-citation problem

Daniel Bar-Shalom, a pharmacist at the University of Copenhagen, was incensed.

He’d been asked to review a manuscript by Muhammad Imran Qadir, an associate professor at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, Pakistan. According to his institution’s website, Qadir was the “top pharmaceutical scientist” in the country. But Bar-Shalom thought the introduction to the paper felt like it could have been written by a student. The real problems started in the middle of the article, however, in what Bar-Shalom came to think of as “the fill of a shit sandwich.”

There, sprinkled throughout the text, were several irrelevant and trivial sentences. “Novel drugs and vaccines are being made or designed by scientists,” read one. “Genomics and proteomics have been longstanding tools in the creation of novel drugs,” another stated.

Continue reading Reviewer finds ‘top pharmaceutical scientist’ has a self-citation problem

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).

While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction. 

“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”

Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.

Continue reading Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

Weekend reads: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’

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 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 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.

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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’

Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs

iStock

An appeals court in Switzerland has overturned a 2025 defamation conviction against a sleuth who had identified dozens of conference proceedings with signs of citation manipulation. The ruling orders the plaintiff to pay the sleuth’s legal expenses. 

The judgment clears Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, in a lawsuit filed against him in 2023 by Shadi Aljawarneh, a computer scientist at the Jordan University of Science and Technology. 

The case stemmed from a blog post Pirelli published in January 2023 summarizing problems with the proceedings of conferences organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Aljawarneh was the chair of most of the conferences, and the proceedings included signs of citation stuffing in Aljawarneh’s favor. 

Continue reading Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs

One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

Figure from correspondence to The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today. 

The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828. The researchers, led by Maxim Topaz of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, used AI to “distinguish genuine fabrications from formatting discrepancies such as informally abbreviated titles.”

Topaz’s group located the sharpest increase in hallucinated references in mid-2024, which they note coincided with the rise of AI writing tools. The findings come as Nature reported last month that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 “might include invalid references generated by AI.” Retraction Watch has seen its fair share of reports of hallucinated citations generated by LLMs like ChatGPT.

Continue reading One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed

Vladimir Ivanov

In August 2021, several news outlets in Russia reported a cancer breakthrough: Researchers at the chemistry and biophysics institutes affiliated with  the Russian Academy of Sciences had developed a new kind of nanoparticle that could help detect breast cancer in an MRI and kill tumor cells at the same time. State-run media and several Russian science outlets reported on the study over the next few days.

But four years later, Journal of Materials Chemistry B, the journal that had published the paper, retracted it. 

The publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry, found the paper contained repeating patterns in the electron microscopy data and several images depicting cells that were identical to those included in a later paper with a number of the same authors. The authors — who include Vladimir Ivanov, director of Russia’s Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, and Alexander Baranchikov, also at the institute — all agreed to the retraction.

Continue reading Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed

Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms

Comparison provided by Van Tu Duong

A science competition for middle and high school students in Vietnam is embroiled in controversy as its winners head to next week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair – widely considered the most prestigious event of its kind. Allegations include cheating and plagiarizing. 

Observers in Vietnam noticed the suspect work appears to be especially advanced to have been conducted by two high school students, one of whom is studying mathematics and the other geography. Under the rules of the Vietnam Science and Engineering Fair (ViSEF), the project – titled “Development of multifunctional fire-resistant, heat-insulating, and antimicrobial polyurethane composite materials for application in construction and daily life” – had to have been completed in 12 months while the two student-authors also continued their school work. 

Sleuths in a Vietnamese scientific integrity group have found multiple overlaps between the students’ poster and research published in RSC Advances in February 2025. A graph in the students’ poster is almost identical to one in the published paper, according to sleuth Van Tu Duong, although it is plotted in a different color and thickness (see the comparison above). This observation has led to allegations that the students had access to the researchers’ raw data. 

Continue reading Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms

Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books

A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.

Carla Rossi, scientific director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi in Verona, Italy, must repay the funding due to extensive plagiarism discovered in the texts, according to the decision by the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, released in January. Rossi also is barred from applying for grant funding from the foundation for five years, according to the ruling. Rossi is founder and director of Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats in Barcelona and also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (RECEPTIO) in Switzerland, which operates an academic press that has published Rossi’s works. 

The Swiss body issued the funding ban in 2024 and ordered Rossi to repay grants for a total of three books after finding a pattern of plagiarism and lack of transparency during the grant application process, according to a summary in the court decision. Rossi took the foundation to court over the findings, arguing it reviewed incorrect versions of her books and suggesting other versions circulating on the Internet were altered or manipulated by third parties.

Continue reading Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books

ORI announces 15-year debarment against former Rice University scientist

Ariel Fernández

The U.S Office of Research Integrity has formally announced a 15-year funding debarment against a former Rice University scientist for research misconduct, resolving allegations that arose 17 years ago. 

Chemist Ariel Fernández intentionally fabricated data in 12 grant-supported papers, four unpublished manuscripts, one presentation and three grant applications while a professor at Rice University in Houston, according to a notice posted May 1 on ORI’s website and to be published in the Federal Register on May 5. As part of the sanctions, Fernández is barred from receiving federal research funds for 15 years. The announcement is the third finding this year from ORI. 

The notice follows a decision nearly a year ago by administrative law judge (ALJ) Margaret G. Brakebusch upholding ORI’s findings and recommended debarment, issued in 2022, after an appeal by Fernández. We reported on that ALJ decision after it was made public in February of this year. An exclusion record posted the same day our story ran shows Fernández’s debarment started on March 25. (We reached out to ORI about the case on March 5.) 

Continue reading ORI announces 15-year debarment against former Rice University scientist

Weekend reads: A retraction for top cancer researcher; paper mill ads paired to IEEE proceedings; about that study on ChatGPT and learning

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 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 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.

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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: A retraction for top cancer researcher; paper mill ads paired to IEEE proceedings; about that study on ChatGPT and learning