If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Court: University disclosure of researcher’s misconduct did not violate due process
- Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name
- U.K. surgeon’s endeavors include unreproducible data and publications for a price. Related report from the Medical Evidence Project
- ‘I have never been asked to review anything’: Editors resign from materials journal
- History journal retracts paper about killing of German WWI POWs
- Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited
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 460, 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):
- “The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing.”
- “Alzheimer’s drug developers accuse clinical trial sites of faking data.”
- “Bill Ackman Says He Has Funded Francesca Gino’s Legal Defense Since June 2024.” Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, was accused of plagiarism in 2024, as we reported.
- “In Scientific Publishing, Who Should Foot the Bill?”
- In an open letter, sleuths call for retraction of BMJ paper with mismatched data and an expression of concern.
- “In Memoriam: The Academic Journal.”
- “[AI] use and the evaluation of the output require more human effort, not less.”
- On the last day of 2025, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity releases its 2024 annual report.
- “The $600,000 plagiarism report the University of Maryland won’t release.”
- “AI is causing the falsification problem to literally explode. But why is this happening – and what could be done about it?“
- “Emerging Ecologies for Misconduct in the Era of Open Access : Challenges for Editors,” a keynote presentation.
- “How Nature Became a ‘Prestige’ Journal.”
- “DOJ Sent Letters to Medical Journals. Then What Happened?“
- “AI-generated commentaries and letters to the editor of peer-reviewed publications: editors and authors beware!” Meet one author we covered in 2023 who published over 500 letters to editors in a year.
- “Why do researchers commit misconduct?”
- One researcher says the future of international collaboration is “uncertain,” while others find journals are becoming increasingly international on average.
- Researchers propose the “Citation Discrepancy Index,” which they say is “designed to explore the often-ignored extreme discrepancies in author citation counts across bibliographic databases and scientific fields.”
- “Paper Mills: a new threat to scientific publishing,” by Dorothy Bishop.
- “Fine-Grained Detection of AI-Generated Writing in the Biomedical Literature.”
- “Forget Plagiarism: It’s Originality, Utility, and Contribution That Matter in Academia Now.”
- “Funders ‘should support shared AI tools for translational research,’” says UK institute.
- “Penalties for withdrawn papers and self-citation proposed by Stanford researcher would hit…Chinese universities.”
- “Research integrity solutions need to scale both ways.”
- “Beyond openness: Inclusiveness and usability of Chinese scholarly data in OpenAlex.”
- Vietnamese newspaper looks back at 2025, when scientific integrity was “incorporated into law for the first time” as a “result of a process that began with a series of investigative articles.”
- “A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of AI Policies in Academic Peer Review.”
- “Appeals court agrees that NIH cannot reduce overhead payments to academic institutions.”
- “Officer committed misconduct over mushroom foraging report.”
- Researchers ask AI to predict what will change in scholarly publishing in 2026.
Upcoming Talks
- “Retractions: On The Rise, But Not Enough” with our Ivan Oransky (Carnegie Mellon University, January 23)
- “Maintaining Integrity in Peer-Reviewed Publications,” Jefferson Anesthesia Conference 2026, featuring our Adam Marcus (February 2, Big Sky, Montana)
- “Responding to Research Misconduct Allegations,” a EurekAlert!AAAS webinar featuring our Ivan Oransky (February 3, virtual)
- “Scientific Integrity Challenged by New Editorial Practices,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (February 12, virtual)
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].