Month: May 2025

Weekend reads: Journal halts submissions, citing NIH cuts; rejected paper published by ‘mistake’; feds cancel grant amid misconduct allegations

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

  • University of Toronto should take action on flawed breast screening study, says longtime critic
  • Experiment using AI-generated posts on Reddit draws fire for ethics concerns
  • AI-Reddit study leader gets warning as ethics committee moves to ‘stricter review process’
  • Why has it taken more than a year to correct a COVID-19 paper?
  • A Ph.D. in paper mills? 
  • Former cancer researcher who sued university for discrimination hits 35 retractions

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 58,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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: Journal halts submissions, citing NIH cuts; rejected paper published by ‘mistake’; feds cancel grant amid misconduct allegations

Former cancer researcher who sued university for discrimination hits 35 retractions

A cancer researcher who was once the subject of a misconduct investigation at an Illinois university more than 10 years ago has made his debut on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard with 35 retractions. 

Last month Oncogene, a Springer Nature title, retracted 15 articles by Jasti Rao, formerly of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria. A 2014 university investigation into his lab’s publications found manipulation and rotation of images that “‘show a disturbing pattern’ indicative that Rao acted intentionally or recklessly,” we previously reported.  Rao sued the university for wrongful termination but lost. 

More than 100 of Rao’s papers have comments on PubPeer, most originating from a user called Lotus azoricus. We now know that pseudonym belongs to sleuth Elisabeth Bik.

Continue reading Former cancer researcher who sued university for discrimination hits 35 retractions

A Ph.D. in paper mills? 

Bank Phrom/Unsplash

A university and a publisher are teaming up to combat paper mills in a unique way: By enlisting a Ph.D. candidate.

In April, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands announced it would be collaborating with Wiley to establish a four-year research position focused on paper mills.

“Of course one Ph.D. will not fix the problem,” said Cyril Labbé of Grenoble Alpes University in France, whose lab hosted a Ph.D. student in 2014 to detect computer-generated manuscripts. “But going this way is far more constructive than resorting to empty rhetoric and wooden language, as some publishers tend to do.”

Continue reading A Ph.D. in paper mills?