If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Spanish court rules researcher plagiarized colleague, orders withdrawal of works
- Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit
- Lancet flags long-scrutinized report of infant poisoned by opioids in breast milk
- Journal silently removes paper for plagiarism, author claims identity theft
- U.S. ORI’s first finding of 2026: Researcher faked data in grant apps
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up over 640, and our mass resignations list has 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.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Largest leucovorin-autism trial retracted” after “reanalysis of the data revealed errors and failed to replicate the results.”
- Researchers create a machine learning model “to distinguish paper mill publications from genuine cancer research articles.”
- Science has retracted a paper on sponges’ position on the evolutionary tree for errors in data analysis. Read more about it in last week’s Nature.
- “The role of PubPeer in retractions of highly-cited articles.”
- Researchers propose the “Retraction Impact Index (RII), to quantify the retraction effect” by measuring changes in citation trends before and after retraction.”
- “Why Authors Aren’t Disclosing AI Use and What Publishers Should (Not) do About It.”
- “Australian agencies’ control over outputs “is a threat to research integrity,” experts warn.”
- University of Tokyo Hospital head quits after colleagues arrested for bribery that may have affected research projects.
- “Citation cartels use fake author names to target chemistry journals.”
- An open-source tool that “provides a one-stop shop to help you assess whether journals and conferences are trustworthy or predatory.”
- “We need to move beyond the accept/reject binary in peer review,” say eLife staff members.
- “Self-Disclosed Use of AI in Research Submissions to BMJ Journals.”
- “A landmark sustainability study was wrong. Correcting it took two years.”
- “If the economics make sense, should we pay peer reviewers?”
- “Settlement Shows Failure of Integrity Oversight, More Suits Coming“: The latest on Dana-Farber’s $15 million settlement of image manipulation suit.
- “Academic publishers defeat lawsuit over ‘peer review’ pay, other restrictions.”
- “Bloomsbury withdraws legal textbook after author’s CV unravels.”
- Researchers find nearly 300 papers at linguistics conferences contained hallucinated citations.
- “AI research deluge: why one conference is asking authors to rank their own papers.”
- “5 Things We Learned About Journal Peer Review in 2025.”
- “Artificial Intelligence and the Fraud Industry in Scientific Publishing”: A roundtable discussion from a conference by the Spanish Research Ethics Committee.
- “Is Peer Review Really in Decline? Analyzing Review Quality across Venues and Time.”
- “On the troubling rise of generative AI suspicion in academic publishing.”
- “Does charging for corrections in the bioscience literature disincentivize pre-publication handling of problematic image data?”
- “To be or not to be value-free? A tension in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.”
- “American-Studies Journal Articles Biased Against U.S., Analysis Says.”
- “Recognition, Workload and Sustainability: Perspectives of Australian Journal Editors.”
- “Funder review rights ‘leave researchers in impossible position.'”
- “Why write a literature review if AI can do it for you?”
- “Science is self-correcting… Except when its not.”
- “So long, and thanks for all the Researchfish.”
Upcoming Talks
- “Scientific Integrity Challenged by New Editorial Practices,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (February 12, virtual)
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