Retraction Watch

Scientist who alleged COVID cover-up circulated a faked NIH email, agency says

A scientist charged with research misconduct used a fake email communication with an NIH researcher’s address to support his claims of governmental retalliation, Retraction Watch has learned.

Last month, we reported on the upholding of a proposed 15-year debarment by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appeals judge against Argentine chemist Ariel Fernández for falsifying research while a professor at Rice University in Houston. Administrative law judge Margaret G. Brakebusch based that May 2025 decision on findings by Rice sent to the Office of Research Integrity in 2010 and conclusions from ORI’s independent review completed in 2022.

Fernández denied the misconduct allegations and told us the findings were retaliation by the government for a 2021 paper he wrote supporting a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2. As evidence of the contention, Fernández showed us an email purportedly from National Institutes of Health researcher Joshua Cherry dated June 2021. The email, which appeared to be from Cherry’s NIH address, threatened to resurrect Fernández’s ORI case if he didn’t remove the paper. We could not independently verify the email’s authenticity at the time.

Weekend reads: LLMs ‘are not the problem’; Cash for peer review ‘doesn’t work,’ project finds; ‘Many Flaws, Few Retractions’ in vaping literature

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data
Publisher changes citation, registration policies following Retraction Watch investigation
A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’
Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders? Scientists “are divided over whether this centralized, confidential list would solve the problem or generate new ones,” Nature reports.
Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

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.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, have metered access or require free registration to read):

Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

*Public comment is invited through April 17, 2026.*

A Canadian panel is proposing several changes to its guidelines for responsible conduct of research, including a provision that effectively removes any statute of limitations on investigations into potential misconduct.

The proposed revisions, from the Canadian Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research (PRCR), are up for public comment until April 17 and have not been made official. The PRCR is an interdisciplinary review and advisory body to Canada’s three federal research funding agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?

*Mark Barnes (courtesy of Ropes and Gray LLC)*

In an editorial published today in Science, Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes call for greater transparency in investigations of scientific misconduct with an aim toward making sure prospective academic employers know of applicants’ past misdeeds. As we’ve reported, in the absence of transparency around findings of misconduct, some universities have discovered too late they hired someone who has turned out to be a serial offender.

Lauer, who served as Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health from 2015-2025, and Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions, propose a tracking system similar to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). That database logs adverse actions and malpractice payments as a way to inform decisions about individual physicians by hospitals. As Lauer and Barnes note, federal law “requires a hospital to query the NPDB whenever it is considering a new applicant for medical privileges, as well as to conduct repeat queries every 2 years to make sure information on staff is up to date.” We asked Barnes to elaborate on the ideas presented in the op-ed. (He notes he is speaking only for himself here.)

Retraction Watch: You write in your op-ed universities may avoid sharing personal information — presumably including results of misconduct investigations — for fear of legal claims of defamation or violations of privacy. Are those fears valid?

A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’

As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors naming her as the correction notice.

The sleuth calls it “ethical editorial malpractice.” The publisher says it was an “administrative error.” After Retraction Watch reached out for comment, the journal removed the text of the email from the correction notice.

The paper, on trends in chronic kidney disease in people with lupus, appeared in BMC Nephrology in August.

Publisher changes citation, registration policies following Retraction Watch investigation

*Wolters Kluwer global headquarters in the Netherlands*

The Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer has scrapped some of its citation and study-registration requirements at a top-ranked surgery journal founded by the U.K. plastic surgeon Riaz Agha, Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows our investigation last month that found mandatory citation of reporting guidelines developed by Agha and published in the International Journal of Surgery (IJS) had inflated the impact factor of the open-access title, making it more attractive to authors and readers.

A blanket requirement to register all human studies before manuscript submission, contrary to recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, appeared to serve another of Agha’s business interests: a paid research registry he founded in 2015.

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data

Markus Englund, a software developer and sleuth based in the Netherlands, first hit paydirt with invasive plant species in China. After having scanned 12 other published scientific datasets with his novel detection software with no results, he came across one showing something suspicious: rows and rows of measurements of plant roots repeated across entirely different species.

“I was really excited,” he said in a recent call with Retraction Watch. “I couldn’t think of any innocent explanation for why that would be the case.”

Englund had built a tool dedicated to “purging” fabricated data by identifying “impossible” data in spreadsheets available on open repositories, according to Science Detective, his site about the initiative. From his initial review, he has found 18 datasets containing duplicated values that are possibly serious enough to need correcting — including one from an influential paper on Parkinson’s disease, as The Transmitter recently reported. (Retraction Watch’s cofounder Ivan Oransky is that publication’s editor-in-chief.)

Weekend reads: Half of social science ‘doesn’t replicate’; ‘Scientific ghosts: Life after retraction’; multisensory learning paper retracted

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?
Jury to decide whether Duke retaliated against researcher who reported sexual harassment
BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’
Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage
Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’
Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

I am a research ethicist and often get asked by my university to investigate when potential concerns are raised about our staff or students. One example involved the recent case of the alleged paper mill and self-citation activities by Hitler Louis and Innocent Benjamin. The matter raised significant questions about who within the research community has the responsibility to act when concerns like this are raised.

Regular readers of Retraction Watch know that detecting alleged research misconduct is a haphazard affair. Frequently a university will find out about concerns after being notified by research integrity sleuths writing under pseudonyms. In this case, “Cisticola Tinniens” informed us that one of our current MSc students (Benjamin) had an unusually high number of publications for his early career stage, with some highlighted on the PubPeer website as potentially problematic.

The first thing we did was to check to see whether our university was named in any of these papers, as clearly institutions do have a responsibility for research attributed to our researchers or students. We found only one of the suspect papers named us directly, and since the work definitely had not occurred at our institution, it was relatively easy to get this affiliation corrected almost immediately.

Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’

A judge has dismissed a legal challenge aimed at forcing Elsevier to retract a long-criticized study that concluded the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens.

The 2001 paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), has faced scrutiny for more than 20 years by critics who say the study has led to unwarranted and potentially harmful prescribing of the drug to youth. As we reported last October, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper shortly after a lawsuit was filed by attorney George W. Murgatroyd III against the journal’s owner, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and Elsevier, which publishes the title.

In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Murgatroyd claimed the journal is violating the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by continuing to “publish, distribute, and sell a fraudulent scientific article that contains material facts” that mislead the public and endanger adolescent mental health and safety. AACAP and Elsevier are profiting from the article by charging readers to buy access to the paper, according to the complaint.

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