If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds
- Reviewer finds ‘top pharmaceutical scientist’ has a self-citation problem
- Elsevier journal removes two 42-year-old papers on cesium as a cancer treatment
- Nine years after journalist raised concerns, BMJ Group journal retracts stent paper
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, 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.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Autism-Vaccine Researcher Arraigned in the U.S.” on wire fraud and money laundering charges.
- “Gotcha! Odd language mistakes may help identify fake papers“: A finding of ‘accidental watermarks’ by our Medical Evidence Project.
- “Splitting status and substance: The diverging fates of breakaway and zombie journals,” featuring our Mass Resignations List.
- “The inside story of the falsification of a Kyoto University professor’s ‘career-building paper.'” And was the investigation conducted fairly?
- “Retractions ‘must be the start of AI slop clean-up’, says critic.”
- “Research ‘Junkification’ is Caused by Researchers, Not Journals.”
- Anna Abalkina on the Tanu.pro paper mill, which she says has been present in Italy “for a long time.”
- Researchers provide “conservative estimate” of nearly 150,000 hallucinated citations in 2025 alone. And “Safeguards against GenAI hallucination in literature reviews.”
- University in China fires, issues ban on dean for misconduct.
- “Rising Retraction Rates: A Symptom of a Strained System.”
- Hospital in Norway “Uses Patient Data for Research Without Consent.”
- “30 researchers publish scathing critiques of study that questioned date of early human occupation of Monte Verde in Chile.”
- “The next unit of science: Is the scientific paper due to be replaced?”
- “Challenges to research integrity in rheumatology: the threat of paper mills, fraud and click data science.”
- “Virologist accused of starting COVID-19 will fight U.S. ban on funding.”
- “AI agents may be skilled researchers—but not always honest ones.” And “The AI scientist: now academic papers can be fully automated, what does this mean for the future of research?”
- “Scientific retractions: causes, processes, and implications for research integrity.”
- Researchers propose a “transparent universal credit system to incentivize peer review.”
- “Fake data, AI slop, and the future of academia”: A podcast episode featuring Elisabeth Bik.
- “Beyond genuine collaboration: the rise of strategic co-authorship in contemporary academic publishing.”
- “Will Paying Reviewers Ease the Peer Review Crisis?”
- “The U.S. government has recently convicted multiple postdocs from China for improper shipments of biological materials. Some see a replay of the 2018 China Initiative.”
- “Tenure is not what it used to be, as these Tufts professors found out.”
- “As researchers aim for universal AI disclosure guidelines, the devil is in the details“: Reflections from this year’s World Conference on Research Integrity.
- “The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times is someone you’ll never meet.”
- “As scientific fraud proliferates, so do businesses that aim to stop it.”
- “Notice ‘Subtle’ Behavior, Fight Cynicism: Tips From Whistleblower Attorney in $15M Dana-Farber Case.” A link to Eugenie Reich’s recent guest post for Retraction Watch.
- “‘Endemic micro-cheating’ by academics ‘going unpunished,'” says university dean.
- “Allegations of mismanagement at the School of Industrial Design in Lund.”
- “Identificatory underpinnings of ethical research behavior for graduate students: Evidence from a baseline sample of a university research ethics training program.”
- Researchers say the scholarly system “is not totally broken, but breaking it certainly is.”
- “Reasons for retractions in potential predatory journals”: A study.
- “After USDA request, Indiana plant biologist locked out of lab by school.”
- “Letters to the editor on scientific sleuthing and lab safety.”
- “Science discussions of retracted articles on Bluesky: public scrutiny or misinformation spreading?”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Not clear how the indictment of a researcher for diverting CDC grant money has anything to do with the content of his publications or the validity of its findings. Retraction Watch risks becoming what local town laws used to call a “common scold.”
I have no idea what you’re on to. Misappropriation of grant fund has been a topic on numerous occasions before.
Not every ASD child’s parent(s) can afford the price of a formal, professional’s diagnosis in the U.S. or even Canada. Abroad, we Canadians are often envied for our supposedly universal healthcare; yet, in a sufficiently significant way, it already comes second to the big-profit interests of industry, thanks to big pharma’s insatiable greed.
My autism spectrum disorder is an obvious condition with which I greatly struggle(d) while unaware until I was a half-century old that its component dysfunctions had formal names. Then, again, had I been aware back in the 1970s and ’80s I likely would’ve kept it a secret nevertheless, especially at school, lest the A-word [autism] gets immediately followed by the F-word [freak].
Realistically, while children with ‘low-functioning’ ASD seem to be more recognizable thus treated in school systems, high-er (as opposed to high) functioning ASD students — who tend to not exhibit the more overt, debilitating symptoms of autism — are more likely to be left to fend for themselves, except if their parents can finance specialized education.
Nevertheless, if it is feasible, parents should seriously consider not enrolling their high-er functioning ASD child in regular, ‘neurotypical’ grade school.
As a boy with an undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, my public-school Grade 2 teacher was the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her large, dark sunglasses when dealing with me.
Rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame: I was a ‘difficult’ boy, therefore she likely perceived me as somehow ‘deserving it’. But not being mentally, let alone physically, abused within or by an educational system is definitely a moral right; I was simply unable to see this.
Perhaps schoolteachers should receive training in high-er functioning ASD, especially if the rate of autism diagnoses is increasing. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition.
Neurodiversity lessons, while not overly complicated or extensive, might help reduce the incidence of chronic bullying against such vulnerable students. It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with high-er functioning ASD are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a ‘choice’.
It would also elucidate how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe higher-functioning ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. And that this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately elevated rate of suicide among them.
It would be great if there could be some valuable academic or clinical use from it all in the future—to create or extract from it some practical positivity and purpose—so that all of the suffering will not have been in vain but instead possibly help other people struggling daily with a similar debilitating affliction.