Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Journal retracts ADHD intervention papers; ‘Science and the crisis of trust’; letters to editors surge

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Former Australian science agency ecology researcher loses two papers
Dozens of board members resign from big-data journal after mass staff firings
Review mill in Italy targeting ob-gyn journals, researchers allege
Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff
Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study
Journal retracts ‘bizarre’ placebo effect paper

Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity? Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Journal retracts ‘bizarre’ placebo effect paper

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in December 2024, analyzed 30 clinical trials examining treatments for a total of five conditions. The authors concluded “the placebo-effect is the major driver of treatment effects in clinical trials that alone explains 69% of the variance.” It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The last author of the study is Harald Walach, who may be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch. In one now-retracted paper, Walach and his coauthors claimed the COVID-19 vaccines killed two people for every three deaths they prevented. In a different, also retracted paper, Walach and colleagues claimed children’s masks trap carbon dioxide. (They later republished the article in a different journal.)

Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study

A week after The BMJ published a highly publicized paper claiming stem cell therapy can reduce the risk of heart failure, sleuths have unearthed what they are calling “serious” inconsistencies in the data.

The paper claims the phase III clinical trial published October 29 included over 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, and tested whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack.

The results were celebrated in a press release by the journal and appeared in several news outlets, with New Scientist calling the study the “strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself.”

Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff

In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting. Kim hadn’t been told about the paper, nor had anyone asked his permission to use the data. The findings were central to Kim’s Ph.D. thesis and publishing them would mean the data were no longer original.

“I was shaking in the lab,” he recalled recently. “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He wanted to be credited as a coauthor on any papers using his results. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper.

Review mill in Italy targeting ob-gyn journals, researchers allege

Examples of “boilerplate” text used in the suspect reviews.
*M.A. Oviedo-Garcia et al/medRxiv 2025*

A network of peer reviewers in Italy is targeting medical journals, threatening “both the scientific record and patient safety,” a team of researchers report. Without more transparency by journals, they say, most review mills will remain impossible to detect.

In a preprint posted on medRxiv on October 23, sleuths Dorothy Bishop, René Aquarius and Maria Ángeles Oviedo-García say they discovered the alleged review mill when they stumbled upon seemingly “boilerplate” comments in a peer review. This discovery led the trio to search for published peer reviews that shared similar terminology — work that ultimately identified 195 suspect reviews of 170 articles published between Feb. 6, 2019, and July 7, 2025. The researchers speculate the number of articles affected is likely higher given most journals do not publish their peer reviews.

The alleged mill is run by “well-established, Italian physicians in the fields of gynecology and oncology,” wrote the authors of the new study, which also noted the reviewers were refereeing papers with clinical implications, a pattern the authors called “alarming.”

Dozens of board members resign from big-data journal after mass staff firings

More than three-fifths of the editorial board of a biomedical sciences journal resigned after the publication’s operations moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China, and the editors and software team were fired with 30 days’ notice.

GigaScience is published in partnership between Oxford University Press and GigaScience Press, the publishing division of BGI, a genomics company based in Shenzhen, according to their website.

On October 29, B.F. Francis Ouellette, a bioinformatics consultant, sent the resignation notice in an email addressed to Oxford University Press and the new editor-in-chief of the journal, Xun Xu. According to the email, which was signed by 30 of the journal’s 49 board members, those resigning became “increasingly concerned about the recent structural and editorial changes at GigaScience and how they may affect the journal’s long-standing commitment to publishing rigorously reviewed, reproducible research.”

Former Australian science agency ecology researcher loses two papers

One of the retracted papers proposed an epigenetic clock to estimate the age of sea turtles.
*Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0*)

A molecular ecology researcher has lost two papers and received an expression of concern for a third after coauthors flagged data issues with the papers.

All three papers appeared in Molecular Ecology Resources and describe the use of DNA methylation as an epigenetic clock to predict the age of different animals. The journal retracted two of the studies in July. The first, published in June 2021, estimated ages for three threatened fish species. The second appeared in April 2022 and proposes a clock for predicting the age of sea turtles. The articles have been cited 41 and 32 times, respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The lead author on those two studies was Benjamin Mayne, formerly a researcher at Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), based in Canberra.

Weekend reads: Another CDC journal in trouble; Web of Science company endorses Iraq awards; on the scarcity of peer reviewers

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Embattled journal Cureus delisted from Web of Science, loses impact factor
‘A new low’: Researchers at Iraqi university must cite colleagues, school journals in papers
Challenge accepted: A reader wrote a program to find fake references in books
Widespread image reuse, manipulation uncovered in animal studies of brain injury
Exclusive: Web of Science company involved in dubious awards in Iraq

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Exclusive: Web of Science company involved in dubious awards in Iraq

Hayder A. Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, speaks at an awards ceremony at the country’s Science Day celebration.
*Source: Instagram*

In the string of prestigious awards Qusay Hassan, a mechanical engineer at the University of Diyala in Iraq, had received from the hands of his country’s minister for higher education and scientific research, the last two stood out: Each trophy carried the name and logo of the global analytics company Clarivate, a name seen widely as a key scholarly imprimatur.

The British-American firm runs the influential Web of Science Master Journal List, which it curates based on several quality criteria, and also calculates journal impact factors. The company says it takes retractions into account when calculating its highly coveted researcher designations.

But Hassan, who has had 21 papers retracted, was one of several Iraqi scientists and institutions winning accolades at the ministry’s high-profile Iraq Education Conference 2025 in Baghdad earlier this month. At the award ceremony on October 11, a deputy minister said a Clarivate team helped develop the selection criteria for the awards, which were based on Web of Science data. Like the other winners, Hassan received his two trophies from the minister, Naeem Abd Yaser Al-Aboudi, after a Clarivate representative announced his name from the stage.

Widespread image reuse, manipulation uncovered in animal studies of brain injury

One of the papers in the analysis contained a figure (bottom) found to have overlap with other work by the same author (top). Both papers have been retracted.
*Annotated images: PubPeer*

More than 200 papers on ways to prevent brain injury after a stroke contain problematic images, according to an analysis published today in PLOS Biology. Researchers found dozens of duplicated Western blots and reused images of tissues and cells purportedly showing different experimental conditions — both within a single paper and across separate publications.

As we reported last year, René Aquarius and Kim Wever, of the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, first noticed these patterns in 2023 when they started working on a systematic review of animal studies in the field. They had wanted to identify promising interventions for preventing early brain injury following hemorrhagic stroke. Instead, their efforts turned into an audit of suspicious papers in their field.

Of the 608 studies they analyzed, more than 240, or 40 percent, contained problematic images. So far, 19 of those articles have been retracted and 55 corrected, mostly from the researchers’ efforts to alert journals and publishers about the issues. Almost 90 percent of the problematic papers had a corresponding author based in China, and many appeared in major journals such as Stroke, Brain Research and Molecular Neurobiology.

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