Roger Watson was seeking answers. Last September, a paper in his journal had attracted criticism he thought he and his fellow editors at Nurse Education in Practice should have caught.
The February 2025 paper described the role of moulage, or simulated, realistic-looking wounds, in training nurses to perform endotracheal suction, a way of clearing out the lungs. One group used dummies with simulated bodily fluids, and the other group used regular dummies. An expert flagged the paper seven months after it was published: Tubes used in groups with or without moulage dummies had “significant size difference, which may have influenced the level of difficulty for participants to complete the suctioning task,” the expert wrote in an email Retraction Watch has seen.
The authors responded to the concerns at first, but then the conversation reached an impasse, the authors stopped responding, and the only choice, Watson said, was to retract the paper.
Watson, the editor-in-chief of the journal and a professor at Saint Francis University in Hong Kong, told us he feels a sense of personal responsibility for the paper getting through review without addressing some major questions. The oversight is a symptom of an increasing workload at his small journal, he said.
“In some cases, the glance I give to papers is quite cursory, as was obvious from this paper,” he said. The editor-in-chief “just doesn’t have time to go into things in a huge amount of detail, unfortunately. So, we tend to look at the abstract and then think, is this suitable? Is it within scope?”
“Then you’re passing it on to an editor, associate, [or] one of your deputies, who you hope will also look at it, and then it’s reviewed,” he said. “You’re kind of hoping that down the line if there’s any major problems with this, it’ll be picked up.”
The expert, whose own work was cited in the 2025 paper, also said the authors’ definition of moulage as liquid in a training model is still “unresolved amongst moulage experts globally.”
The journal took the questions to the authors, who responded in a letter we have seen noting the main purpose of the experiment was to assess student learning. They wrote: “in reality, there were no differences between the scenarios other than the presence of secretions and the tube diameter used. These differences arose from the structural characteristics of the manikins.” They also defended their use of the word “moulage” in their experiments.
Given the additional detail provided in the authors’ response, Watson suggested a correction to the article to address the above points, but the authors never responded. “This could have easily been dealt with by a corrigendum, to say look, we forgot to explain this in the paper,” Watson said. After the authors failed to respond, Ganni Shen, the Elsevier publisher for the journal, alerted the authors their paper would be retracted.
The three authors of the article — Dilek Özden, İlkin Yılmaz and Sevda Sönmez — are researchers at Dokuz Eylül University in Türkiye. None responded to our request for comment.
Once the journal decided to proceed with the retraction, Watson alerted us May 18, and Elsevier published the notice on June 4. The retraction is the second for the journal, according to the Retraction Watch Database. The first was of a study retracted in 2023 after a university investigation found it was based on “compromised” survey data.
The journal’s name came up again a year later, when Watson said they would retract a paper after discovering it was a duplicate of an article from another journal. But the article remains unmarked. Watson said the journal’s failure to retract the work was “simply an oversight” and is looking into the case again now.
Nurse Education in Practice received roughly 3,500 submissions in 2025, Watson told us, all of which must go through him before being passed on to an editor. This figure is an increase from around 2,500 in 2024. Across the board, journals are seeing an increase in submissions due to AI.
While Watson is compensated for his work at Nurse Education in Practice, many members of his team are not, he said.
“We’re definitely overworked at the front end of the journal,” Watson told us. “That’s for sure.”
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Some of the key info to understand the retracted paper (and therefore the problems with it) is in the supplementary materials which are no longer accessible. I’ll email and ask if it can be shared – with appropriate watermarking.