June 2025 – Retraction Watch

Fourth retraction for Italian scientist comes 11 years after sleuths flagged paper

PLOS One has retracted a 2011 paper first flagged for image issues 11 years ago. The retraction marks the fourth for the paper’s lead author, Gabriella Marfè of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli,” in Caserta, Italy.

“Involvement of FOXO Transcription Factors, TRAIL-FasL/Fas, and Sirtuin Proteins Family in Canine Coronavirus Type II-Induced Apoptosis,” has been cited 41 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Elisabeth Bik flagged the article on PubPeer in 2014 for apparent image manipulation and duplication in six figures. In a 2019 email to PLOS staff, pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis drew attention to Bik’s findings. The journal retracted the paper on May 6 of this year.

$900,000 grant to Retraction Watch’s parent organization will fund forensic analysis of articles that affect human health

The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch, has launched a new initiative to investigate and rapidly disseminate problems in the medical literature that directly affect human health.

Thanks to a $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy, the Medical Evidence Project will leverage the tools of forensic metascience — using visual and computational methods to determine a paper’s trustworthiness — to rapidly identify problems in scientific articles, combined with the experience and platform of Retraction Watch to disseminate those findings.

“We originally set up The Center for Scientific Integrity as a home for Retraction Watch, but we always hoped we would be able to do more in the research accountability space,” said Ivan Oransky, executive director of the Center and cofounder of Retraction Watch. “The Medical Evidence Project allows us to support critical analysis and disseminate the findings.”

‘Anyone can do this’: Sleuths publish a toolkit for post-publication review

For years, sleuths – whose names our readers are likely familiar with – have been diligently flagging issues with the scientific literature. More than a dozen of these specialists have teamed up to create a set of guides to teach others their trade.

The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG) aims to make “post-publication peer review” more accessible, according to the preprint made available online today. The 25 guides so far range from general – “PubPeer commenting best practices” – to field-specific – like spotting issues with X-ray diffraction patterns.

Although 15 sleuths are named as contributors on the project, those we talked to emphasized the project should be largely credited to Reese Richardson, the author of the preprint.

Guest post: NIH-funded replication studies are not the answer to the reproducibility crisis in pre-clinical research

*Barbara Smaller/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank*

President Trump recently issued an executive order calling for improvement in the reproducibility of scientific research and asking federal agencies to propose how they will make that happen. I imagine that the National Institutes of Health’s response will include replication studies, in which NIH would fund attempts to repeat published experiments from the ground up, to see if they generate consistent results.

Both Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya have already proposed such studies with the objective of determining which NIH-funded research findings are reliable. The goals are presumably to boost public trust in science, improve health-policy decision making, and prevent wasting additional funds on research that relies on unreliable findings.

As a former biomedical researcher, editor, and publisher, and a current consultant about image data integrity, I would argue that conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research. Such studies would be an impractical use of NIH funds, especially in the face of extensive proposed budget cuts.

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