COPE integrity officer loses 22-year-old paper for image concerns

The concerning figure from the paper, Fig. 2A, with increased contrast, courtesy of “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer.

A journal has retracted a 22-year-old-paper whose first author is the integrity officer for the Committee on Publication Ethics over concerns about image editing that “would not be acceptable by modern standards of figure presentation.”

The 2003 paper, “A recombinant H1 histone based system for efficient delivery of nucleic acids,” was published in Elsevier’s Journal of Biotechnology and has been cited 41 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Sleuth Sholto David, who goes by the name “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer, raised concerns about the image in December 2023, pointing out a “[d]ark rectangle” that appeared to be “superimposed onto the image.” 

Continue reading COPE integrity officer loses 22-year-old paper for image concerns

Weekend reads: Nobel Prize winners and retractions; Nature to publish peer reviews automatically; ‘AI or Die’?

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 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: Nobel Prize winners and retractions; Nature to publish peer reviews automatically; ‘AI or Die’?

Editors won’t retract talc and cancer article J&J says is false in court

Steve Dorman/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

A journal will not retract a paper linking use of talc-based baby powder to cancer, despite legal pressure from the pharmaceutical giant that made the product. 

A lawyer representing a unit of Johnson & Johnson in May asked editors of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine to retract a paper on cases of mesothelioma associated with cosmetic talc, following the court-ordered release of the identities of the people described in the article. 

The lawyer alleged many of the patients had other exposures to asbestos than cosmetic talc, rendering the article’s fundamental claims “false.” 

Continue reading Editors won’t retract talc and cancer article J&J says is false in court

Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year

Twenty journals lost their impact factors in this year’s Journal Citation Reports, released today, for excessive self-citation and citation stacking. Nearly half of the journals on the list are from well-known publishers MDPI, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. 

Clarivate releases the annual Journal Citation Reports each June. For the first time, the company excluded citations to retracted papers when calculating this year’s impact factors. Amy Bourke-Waite, a communications director for Clarivate, told Retraction Watch this change affected 1% of journals, none of which lost impact factors in 2025. 

Many institutions use the controversial metric as an indicator of journal quality. And suppressing a journal’s impact factor can have negative effects on the publication and the authors who publish papers in it. 

Continue reading Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year

Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board

Wiley has issued a mass correction at one of its journals after finding nearly 100 papers with undisclosed conflicts of interest related to submissions by board members and relationships between authors and journal editors.

An investigation found conflict of interest issues in 98 papers published from 2020 to 2025 in Geological Journal, although the issues may have gone on before then, sleuths suggest. Nearly a third of the papers shared a single co-author — an associate editor at the journal.

That editor’s contract was not renewed, we have learned.

According to the correction notice, issued in early May, the journal had not taken “measures to manage potential conflicts of interest between authors and editors” for 98 articles. 

Continue reading Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board

Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues

A journal has retracted 16 papers after a whistleblower flagged it for “irregularities” in peer review, among other concerns. 

The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, a Springer Nature title, published the papers between 2021 and 2024. The articles covered research ranging from studies of the work of Haruki Murakami and Kazakh literature to English reading fluency and the teaching competence of parents of children with cochlear implants.

Thirteen of the 16 articles have been cited one to five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science; one article has been cited 19 times, the highest of the bunch. 

Continue reading Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues

When PubMed got it right, Elsevier got it wrong, and Retraction Watch helped clear it up

More than 20 years after publishing a letter saying a set of papers should be retracted — and PubMed marking them as such — the journal has finally retracted the articles, following a Retraction Watch inquiry.

Let’s back up.

In 1998, the journal Contraception published a supplement with six articles on Implanon, a subdermal contraceptive implant. The papers examined the implant’s pharmacodynamics and side effects. The next year, the journal published two clinical studies of the implant, one on its effectiveness as a contraceptive and the other on its effect on lipid metabolism. 

Those two studies took place at centers in Jakarta, Indonesia. Some of the study data published in the supplement also included patients at those centers. 

Continue reading When PubMed got it right, Elsevier got it wrong, and Retraction Watch helped clear it up

Weekend reads: Journals are MAGA’s ‘latest target’; a psychedelic retraction; professor sues rival over plagiarism accusations

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 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: Journals are MAGA’s ‘latest target’; a psychedelic retraction; professor sues rival over plagiarism accusations

Paper rejected for AI, fake references published elsewhere with hardly anything changed

One journal’s trash is another’s treasure – until a former peer reviewer stumbles across it and sounds an alarm.

In April, communications professor Jacqueline Ewart got a Google Scholar notification about a paper published in the World of Media she had reviewed, and recommended rejecting, for another journal several months earlier.

At the time, she recommended against publishing the article, “Monitoring the development of community radio: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis,” in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, or JRAM, because she had concerns the article was written by AI. She also noticed several references, including one she supposedly wrote, were fake. 

Continue reading Paper rejected for AI, fake references published elsewhere with hardly anything changed

Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’

Wafik S. El-Deiry

Brown University physician-scientist Wafik El-Deiry has been a longtime critic of the post-publication forum PubPeer, where 75 of his papers have been flagged. For example, in an April post on X, formerly Twitter, he stated, “It is not good that PubPeer has been weaponized and has become tyrannical.” In July 2024, he referred to the emails authors receive when someone posts a comment about their papers as being “under attack by PubPeer and their anonymous mob.”

PubPeer, started in 2012, won the 2024 Einstein Award For Promoting Quality in Research. (Disclosure: Our co-founder Ivan Oransky is a volunteer member of the board of directors of the PubPeer Foundation.)

In April, a site called Science Guardians, an “online journal club” with remarkable similarities – but also key differences – to PubPeer, launched what it called an “investigation” into PubPeer. Since then the anonymous account has posted numerous posts on X critiquing PubPeer while promising to reveal the “perpetrators of the PubPeer Network Mob.” 

Continue reading Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’