When open data are misused

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When Dorothy Bishop was asked to review a paper for a small neuroscience journal in August, she could tell from the abstract the authors had used a dataset she had first published four years ago on the public repository OpenNeuro. The dataset contained raw functional MRI scans from 50 participants, taken while they completed language-related tasks such as thinking of words and matching words to pictures.

“I was curious that somebody had already analyzed it, because it’s a hefty dataset that would have taken a lot of work to analyze,” Bishop, an emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, told Retraction Watch. 

She quickly found problems in the manuscript. The description of the dataset didn’t match what she and her colleagues had actually done, and several references didn’t support the claims they were cited for. “There was clearly something seriously wrong,” she said. The editor was also suspicious, Bishop said, and the paper was eventually rejected. But Bishop believed the authors would try to publish the manuscript elsewhere, so she did a broader search of their names. 

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Journal investigating paper on heart device with registration number for wrong trial

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The publisher of a European Heart Rhythm Association journal is investigating a paper that lists the incorrect registration number for a clinical study of a widely used but controversial heart implant.

The paper, published in EP Europace in May, described a prospective study of the Watchman FLX, from Boston Scientific, for a procedure called left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) in 400 people with abnormal heart rhythms. The authors concluded the device was “feasible, safe, and resource efficient, achieving high procedural success and low complication rates.” 

Cardiologists have warned of caveats with the device and the LAAO procedure itself, mainly that early studies found LAAO caused a “significantly higher rate of a primary composite endpoint that included stroke, systemic embolism, cardiovascular/unexplained death, and major bleeding.” A study earlier this year found LAAO with a Watchman device increased rates of stroke and other complications when compared to oral medications.

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Weekend reads: ‘The Weimar of knowledge’; ‘Could AI Be Better at Peer Review Than Humans?’; guidelines in South Korea ban hidden prompts, restrict AI use

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):

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Above and beyond: An editor wanted authors to know they’d been falsely cited

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Like many college professors today, Sarah S. Richardson has seen AI-hallucinated citations in work submitted by her students. But she was surprised when an editor recently contacted her about a hallucinated citation involving her own work. 

A March 31 email from the editor in chief of Disability Studies Quarterly explained Richardson was one of six scholars falsely cited in a journal article. The editor apologized for the error and alerted Richardson of the paper’s retraction. 

“The editor took the extra step of informing all scholars who could have been harmed by the hallucinated citation[s] and did so in an exceptionally thoughtful and caring manner,” said Richardson, the Aramont Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. “I suspect that most hallucinated citations are never discovered, let alone redressed by a retraction and outreach to those affected.”

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Tennessee researcher heads to court amid claims of theft, forgery and revenge

In May 2025, Tennessee authorities were preparing to arrest a university math professor for allegedly soliciting university donations from his students and pocketing the money. 

Middle Tennessee State University

Investigative records paint the picture of a professor who took financial and personal advantage of his students for years – from manipulating them into paying him rent to making them clean up after his dog – and grew vengeful when they spoke out about his alleged crimes.

As state investigators closed in, the professor, Don Hong, tried to get revenge against a student who reported him by accusing her of research misconduct and telling a journal to retract a study she recently authored, according to an investigative report from the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. When a grand jury indicted Hong on May 5, 2025, for theft and forgery, it tacked on a retaliation charge for his actions against the student.  

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Wiley investigating book chapter on biodiversity for fake references

While reading a chapter from a 2024 book on restoring biodiversity in post-industrial land earlier this month, an ecologist came across a reference to a study on rewilding she wanted to look up. 

But the ecologist, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the chapter authors, couldn’t find a record of the 2020 paper, purportedly published in Ambio by “Knijn et al.” She decided to check the other references. She told Retraction Watch she found at least eight that didn’t exist. 

The ecologist flagged the issue to the book’s publisher, Wiley, on September 7 but told us she never heard back, aside from an automated response.

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Elsevier journal retracts 100+ papers for authorship issues, editor conflicts of interest

Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) has retracted 165 papers this year, most for “suspicious” changes in authorship or editorial conflicts of interest. 

The retractions have come after STOTEN was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November after the index put it on hold due to concerns about article quality. The journal published over 10,000 articles in 2024; so far this year it has published fewer than 1,000. 

The retractions, most of which were issued in August, applied to articles published from 2018 to 2025. At least 50 of the papers were handled by associate editors who had “an ongoing collaboration on a co-publication” or “an extensive record of collaboration” with the authors of the articles, according to the notices. 

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Misconduct case dropped against AI expert after claims of AI use in recent book

Sweden’s national committee on research misconduct has dismissed a case against an expert in the social ramifications of artificial intelligence following allegations her recent book contained hallucinated references and other signs of AI use. 

The author, Virginia Dignum, a professor in responsible AI at Umeå University, denied references in her book The AI Paradox were fabricated and said she made “ordinary editing mistakes.”

Frank Drewes, head of the computing science department at Umeå University, told Retraction Watch the institution received a report containing the allegations from an anonymous individual on July 6 and referred the case to the National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (NPOF) in Uppsala, in accordance with Swedish regulation.

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Weekend reads: An expression of concern for Nobel Prize winner; DOJ official queried journals on ‘partisan’ views; AI research’s ‘synthetic validity’ problem

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.

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: An expression of concern for Nobel Prize winner; DOJ official queried journals on ‘partisan’ views; AI research’s ‘synthetic validity’ problem

Paper mill studies get cited by clinical guidelines, policy docs and more, analysis finds

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Studies produced by a suspected paper mill are frequently cited in patents, clinical guidelines and policy documents, according to a new analysis. 

The work, posted on arXiv on August 31, examined the fate of nearly 2,000 academic papers with one common factor: At least one coauthor lists the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network (PNN) as an institutional affiliation. 

But there’s one problem: the PNN is not a real network of scientists. Instead, it’s an authorship-for-sale scheme, as Retraction Watch reported in 2022. 

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