Retraction Watch

PeerJ retracts study that secretly observed tourists’ reactions to snakes

For a study published in PeerJ, a researcher placed plastic snakes (left panel) and viper carcasses on hiking paths (right) to gauge people’s reactions. The journal retracted the paper in August for ethics approval concerns.
*A.V. Dyugmedzhiev/PeerJ 2026*

The journal PeerJ has retracted a study that attempted to capture tourists’ “authentic responses” to venomous snakes by putting plastic models and dead vipers around popular hiking destinations and secretly watching how people reacted to the encounters.

Study author Angel Valentinov Dyugmedzhiev of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences assessed their reactions from a few meters away and never interacted with any of the participants so as to avoid “direct interference in the experimental setup,” he wrote in the paper, published June 23.

When tourists discussed the snakes among themselves, he recorded whether they correctly identified the species and whether they realized the viper was either dead or a model. The study found most tourists didn’t spot the vipers, and only a small number of them showed strong fear toward them.

Researchers appeal misconduct finding over studies of trans youth

Five researchers at Norway’s national gender incongruence clinic are appealing a university committee’s finding they committed “gross negligence” and scientific misconduct after the group published several studies using the medical records of more than 1,000 minors without patient consent.

Two of the articles set out to count how many minors were referred to the clinic, characterize the mental health burden of trans patients and document their treatment trajectories and detransition rates. In June, a joint committee of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital (OUS) ruled five of the coauthors committed scientific misconduct for using the patients’ medical records without ethics approval or patient consent. The researchers maintain the work was for quality assurance, which in Norway doesn’t require consent. The committee ruled the work was research.

Two other articles violated research ethics standards in a “reprehensible” way, the committee found, but did not constitute misconduct. Those papers describe the outcomes of chest wall contouring and genital surgery.

Editors of higher education journal coauthor editorial with fake references

Taylor & Francis is investigating an article in one of its journals after the editors published an editorial about academic freedom that contains multiple fake references and citation errors.

In May, Anastasia Christou and Steve Lambert, coeditors of Journal of Higher and Further Education (JHFE), published an opinion piece about attacks on academic freedom and social justice research. The journal’s deputy editor Rosalind Latiner Raby also coauthored the editorial.

Of 31 references in the editorial, at least nine are nonexistent articles or contain incorrect journals or inaccurate author names. The problematic references include real scholars linked to articles they didn’t write and real journal titles associated with the wrong authors. The article also has numerous citation errors in the text. Fake references can be a sign of artificial intelligence use since large language models, such as ChatGPT, are known to hallucinate references.

Weekend reads: The AI ghosts ‘contaminating’ academic publishing; court upholds whistleblower suits; Ariely paper retracted after sleuths flag tampering

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Study by Duke’s Dan Ariely retracted after sleuths find signs of data tampering
Journal retracts paper claiming network of corridors inside the Great Pyramid of Giza
Oxford researchers retract Nature paper on ‘atmospheric thirst’ for calculation errors

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 700, 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, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Procrastination study by Duke’s Dan Ariely retracted after sleuths find signs of data tampering

A psychology journal has retracted a seminal 2002 paper on deadlines and procrastination coauthored by behavioral scientist Dan Ariely of Duke University just days after a team of sleuths published analyses of the original study data, finding it had been tampered with.

The posts, which appeared Aug. 31 and Sept. 2 on the Data Colada blog, dug into the datasets behind the two main experiments in Ariely’s paper, published 24 years ago in Psychological Science. The reanalysis was prompted by a study published July 15 in the same journal attempting to replicate one of the paper’s original experiments.

The Sept. 2 retraction notice cited all three works, noting the replication study “raised questions about the underlying data in the original study,” and the Data Colada posts “called into question the veracity of the overall findings.” Ariely’s coauthor on the paper, Klaus Wertenbroch, of INSEAD in France, requested the retraction on July 23, Psychological Science editor-in-chief Simine Vazire told Retraction Watch.

Oxford researchers retract Nature paper on ‘atmospheric thirst’ for calculation errors

The authors of a June 2025 paper in Nature estimated the contribution of atmospheric evaporative demand on the severity of droughts worldwide, as shown in this figure from the article. The journal retracted the article on Sept. 2.
*S.H. Gebrechorkos et al./Nature 2025*

Nature has retracted a paper on the atmosphere’s role in the severity of droughts around the world after the authors discovered they made a coding error that skewed their measurements. The authors say they’ve already written a revised version of the paper.

The article, published in June 2025, found an increase in “atmospheric thirst,” or atmospheric evaporative demand — a measure of how much water the atmosphere draws from rivers, lakes, soil and so on — has exacerbated the severity of droughts by about 40%. The New York Times covered the work, claiming the study found atmospheric thirst “played an even bigger role than previously thought” in drought severity. The paper has been cited 337 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But the authors discovered “a calculation error” that was “not related to our data or methodology, but a coding error,” lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos told Retraction Watch in a statement sent by the University of Oxford in England. Of the 11 authors on the paper, three, including Gebrechorkos and senior author Simon Dadson, are affiliated with the university.

Journal retracts paper claiming network of corridors inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu.
*Douwe C. van der Zee/Wikimedia Commons*

A journal has retracted a paper by two Italian scientists who claimed to have found hidden structures inside of the oldest and largest of the Pyramids of Giza.

The study, published in Remote Sensing in October 2022, purportedly used synthetic aperture radar to penetrate the Pyramid of Khufu with energy pulses and process the echoes received, revealing a network of rooms, corridors and tunnels. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, as well as in a 2021 report by Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The journal retracted the study on Aug. 10 after a reader “brought concerns to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding methodological issues with this article.” The editors investigated the claims and “confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article.”

Weekend reads: Institute defends Nobel Prize winner; Stanford ex-president tries to refute fraud allegations; cardiologist’s ‘monstrous’ conflict of interest

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Editors of economics journal resign after Elsevier doesn’t renew EIC’s contract
Guest post: The uncomfortable truth an explosion of papers reveals about authors’ access to data
Elsevier to ‘soon investigate’ two Macchiarini papers more than a year after retraction request
Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication
University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 66,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 700, 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, metered access, or require free registration to read):

University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent

New York University Press is pulling all copies of a book about intelligent design after the author falsely quoted another scholar in the work.

Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, by C.W. Howell, was published by NYU Press in 2025. Earlier this month, the publisher said it was “pulling the current edition from the market” and “destroying all existing inventory” after learning Howell attributed an inaccurate quote to Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, according to an Aug. 3 email Retraction Watch has seen.

The misquote stemmed from a passage in a court ruling Howell “mistakenly” read as a direct quote from Behe and attributed as such, he told us. Howell writes about the intersection of faith and science, and serves as an academic director for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication

The Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University in Japan is defending Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka against claims of image manipulation in multiple studies on which he was an author. The institute says questioning Yamanaka’s integrity without sufficient evidence is “completely unacceptable.”

Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 and works at CiRA.

On August 7, Gotham City Research LLC, a short-selling firm based in the United States, released a report alleging image manipulation in several papers by Yamanaka appearing between 2000 and 2020.

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