If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Celebrating Retraction Watch’s 16th birthday, how sweet it is
- High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems
- Meet the inaugural winners of our Ctrl-Z Award, honoring the courage it takes to retract published work
- A composer published a paper on theoretical physics. His lack of credentials drew criticism
- RFK Jr. questions another publisher on expression of concern for a vaccine paper
- Decade-long fraud by market survey firm a ‘gut punch’ for researchers
- Clarivate removes hold on mega-journal Heliyon after internal audit, 650+ retractions
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 66,000 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):
- A second death in a gene therapy trial has been reported in China, following a case we revealed last month. That trial’s entry in ClinicalTrials.gov now acknowledges the death of its sole patient.
- Jason Arday, the now-former Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism who says he is “not a liar,” resigned amid plagiarism allegations hours after the university said it would investigate. And a reporter at Times Higher Education – which killed a story about Arday after he hired a law firm – was “reported to police over the Arday case.” And The Atlantic obtains his book proposal.
- “Q&A from the slop trenches”: fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, and “clear LLM slop” in conference submissions.
- The U.S. Office of Research Integrity received 446 allegations and closed 177 cases in 2025, according to their annual report.
- “325 Bangladeshi research papers retracted over plagiarism and irregularities,” including a “world-class” researcher “linked to ‘paper mill’ network.” A university in Bangladesh launched a probe into misconduct allegations, and 12 papers from another were “retracted over AI use, integrity breaches.”
- “Bangladesh needs a university ranking focused on local priorities.”
- A family’s therapy at an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico was backed by a study retracted over a decade ago.
- “The prevalence of problematic articles in the preclinical [microvascular injury] literature using mouse, rat, and pig models of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion was 28.4%,” say researchers.
- The “science papers that patents cite the most.” Read our recent coverage of over 400 U.S. patents citing retracted papers.
- University opens probe following media reports that researchers produced studies that underplayed the effects of mixing energy drinks with alcohol.
- “Detecting Hallucinated References with Plagiarism Detection Tools”: A talk by Nick Wise, a sleuth who was hired by a publisher last year.
- A now-retracted chemistry paper used a tool to rephrase plagiarized text, writes Sholto David: “final solution” became “mass killing of an ethnic group.”
- Review mills are “setting off a war in academic publishing. What happens to those caught in the middle?”
- “How scholarly publishers are safeguarding trust in science”: A podcast with IOP Publishing chief executive.
- “Our System for Measuring Trust in Research is Failing. There’s a Better Way.”
- The IEEE Publishing Ethics Team says that of 591 cases reported last year, 274 are still under investigation.
- “Publishers and journals are likely to have an amplifying effect because what they publish and promote will come to reflect the AI-influenced evolution of science.”
- “I found an error in my study. Here’s what I learned.”
- “Preprints Without Curation Are Increasingly Cited by Journals,” preprint finds.
- “Do we actually need to write research papers at all?” And “Whoever writes the paper, the tools have to be trustworthy,” both from the founder of Figshare repository.
- “Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts.”
- “Scholarly Publications in an Era of Artificial Intelligence.”
- “The enduring influence of retracted research: determinants and citation patterns across three disciplines.”
- “James Bond, not Bond James: why scientific publishing must respect name order.”
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The idea that foreign name order should be preserved in English-language publications is ridiculous. Try translating a full sentence from, say, Japanese to English. You will need to completely rearrange the words (Japanese always puts verbs at the end of sentences, so a literal translation would read something like “I water drink”, when it should be “I drink water” in English). You will also need to substitute phrases when there is not an exact word-for-word equivalent. And you will need to add words not anywhere in the original Japanese (Japanese has no articles, so you will need to infer where to add “a” and “the”). But name order is where we draw the line?????
And yes, if translating from English into Japanese, I would expect James Bond to become Bond James (in katakana of course).
Anyway, Elton John, not John Elton.
From the “slop trenches” memorandum:
“As a side note, I noticed recently that ICLR is now making author names public on OpenReview which is definitely a choice on how to reel the slop back. I suspect other conferences will follow suit.”
Increasingly, I believe this practice should be the default by now. But even more comprehensively and openly: authors, reviewers, and editors (or conference committee chairs) would all openly appear online with their real names and ORCID records (which should be mandatory and with institutional trust markers). Besides advancing OA, Open Research Europe is a good role model in this regard. MetaROR is another good exemplar. Of course, this practice only works with good-faith submission, so something like the LinkedIn’s new “seems like AI slop” button is needed also for science. The same goes for slop reviews and LLM reviewers. For the amount I am asked to review, I do not have to do thorough reviews for slop. No one has.