If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Professor suspended after Japanese university finds fishy results in sushi paper
- Sage journal retracts more than 40 papers over concerns with peer review, author contributions
- Northwestern to pay $2.3 million for falsified research in NIH grants
- Nature retracts paper for data manipulation by Ph.D. student
- Technobabble papers by professor and editor under scrutiny
- Business management journal holds researcher’s paper hostage
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):
- “Credit in research goes hand in hand with responsibility“: A Nature editorial on its recent retraction.
- “Penalise ‘retraction hotspot’ universities, says integrity tsar.”
- Researchers look into special issues containing more than 1/3 endogeny by guest editors, which they label “Published in Support of Self (PISS).”
- Rising publication costs caused by open access publishing “Strain Researchers.”
- “Peer review needs a revolution. AI is already driving it.”
- “Consequences of undisclosed conflicts of interest in academic publishing.”
- “The Story behind the Science: Preprints of pandemic potential—how bioRxiv and medRxiv brought preprints to the life sciences.”
- “A reel big mystery as a strange new species of error appears in major journals.”
- “Should we be worried? Retractions in complementary and alternative medicine journals.”
- Researchers look into a “scientifically grounded approach to defining the basis and limits of criminalizing fraud and misconduct in clinical trials of medicinal products.”
- “Why ‘Non-Recommended Journals’ Is Preferable To ‘Predatory’ in Academic Publishing.”
- “Oncotarget outrage and the Misinformation Machine.”
- “The AI Shift: Agentic AI is coming for quantitative research.”
- “‘Unseen’ efforts to catch paper mill outputs bear fruit,” says publishing industry report.
- Endocrine society investigates a “predatory” doppelgänger of its journal.
- “Toward a Non-Scientistic Neuroscience: Why Neuroscience Needs the Humanities to Avoid Bad Science, False Certainty, and Real-World Harm.”
- “Confusion Raised Deliberately by the Titles of Predatory Medical Journals: A Threat to Both the Medical Community and Society.”
- “Citation dynamics and altmetric trends of retracted publications in Indian-funded research: pre and post retraction analysis.”
- “AI in Scholarly Publishing”: Results from the SSP “Pulse Check Report.”
- “Computer generated illustrations in peer-reviewed research.”
- Romanian party supports minister accused of plagiarizing doctoral thesis.
- “Scientific sleuthing: a better evening in than watching Netflix?”
- University of Hawaii “Engaged With Hackers Who Highjacked Cancer Study Data.”
- “Interpretations of reproducibility crisis in medical education research: a qualitative study.”
- “Low awareness, informal channels: How [library and information science] researchers perceive retracted papers and its implications for research integrity.”
- “AI-assisted cheating could impact universities’ global standings.”
- “Do you use generative AI to help identify literature you missed? If so, how?”
- “Guidelines needed for the use of AI in the preparation or review” of research ethics boards and committees.
- “Two-thirds of universities report AI use among doctoral students,” survey finds.
- “After the PDF: A new unit of knowledge for the AI era.”
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].