Alicia Gallegos

Above and beyond: An editor wanted authors to know they’d been falsely cited

Like many college professors today, Sarah S. Richardson has seen AI-hallucinated citations in work submitted by her students. But she was surprised when an editor recently contacted her about a hallucinated citation involving her own work.

A March 31 email from the editor in chief of Disability Studies Quarterly explained Richardson was one of six scholars falsely cited in a journal article. The editor apologized for the error and alerted Richardson of the paper’s retraction.

“The editor took the extra step of informing all scholars who could have been harmed by the hallucinated citation[s] and did so in an exceptionally thoughtful and caring manner,” said Richardson, the Aramont Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. “I suspect that most hallucinated citations are never discovered, let alone redressed by a retraction and outreach to those affected.”

Tennessee researcher heads to court amid claims of theft, forgery and revenge

In May 2025, Tennessee authorities were preparing to arrest a university math professor for allegedly soliciting university donations from his students and pocketing the money.

Investigative records paint the picture of a professor who took financial and personal advantage of his students for years – from manipulating them into paying him rent to making them clean up after his dog – and grew vengeful when they spoke out about his alleged crimes.

As state investigators closed in, the professor, Don Hong, tried to get revenge against a student who reported him by accusing her of research misconduct and telling a journal to retract a study she recently authored, according to an investigative report from the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. When a grand jury indicted Hong on May 5, 2025, for theft and forgery, it tacked on a retaliation charge for his actions against the student.

Lawsuit over retraction of abortion pill papers heads toward arbitration decision

A legal challenge by authors over three retracted articles about mifepristone is set for an arbitration conference this month as nationwide debate over the abortion pill heats up at the appellate level.

Ten researchers sued Sage in 2024 after the publisher retracted three of their papers about the purported dangers of mifepristone, a medication that ends early pregnancy. The authors alleged the company “applied inconsistent retraction standards” to their work based on Sage’s perception of their “pro-life affiliations,” in violation of California’s anti-discrimination law, according to their complaint.

The authors asked the Superior Court of California, County of Ventura to compel Sage into arbitration, as required by publishing agreements the researchers signed with the company. Arbitration is an alternative pathway for resolving disputes in which an arbitrator hears the parties’ arguments and issues a decision outside of the traditional court process.

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 Further and Higher Education (JFHE), 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.

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.

Defamation suit demanding Elsevier retract paper heads closer to trial

A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge.

Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS’ needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled “massive” financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” under its “own standards,” but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air.

The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has “plausibly alleged actual malice” by Elsevier defined as “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.” Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler’s recommendation in July 2025.

JAMA journal won’t retract oxycodone paper despite author request, citing no ‘falsification’

JAMA Internal Medicine has rejected a petition by a group of clinicians calling for the journal to retract an article on oxycodone therapy for osteoarthritis. The request — which initially included two of the paper’s original authors — stems from 19-year-old court records revealing the sponsor of the study withheld evidence about opioid withdrawal that contradicted the paper’s conclusions.

Published in 2000 under the journal’s previous name, Archives of Internal Medicine, the study of 133 patients concluded that around-the-clock, controlled-release oxycodone was safe and effective for managing osteoarthritis pain and that withdrawal symptoms were rare. In 2007, documents made public during a federal criminal case against Purdue Frederick Company, the maker of OxyContin, showed the company concealed how many patients became dependent on the drug during the trial and omitted withdrawal data. Purdue pleaded guilty in 2007 to fraudulently marketing OxyContin with the intent to mislead, agreeing to pay the government more than $600 million in penalties.

Despite the withdrawal data being made public nearly 20 years ago, the study has remained in the scientific literature without changes, Andrew Kolodny told Retraction Watch. Kolodny is medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University and president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. Kolodny has also testified before Congress about the opioid epidemic, assisted federal authorities with investigating the opioid industry and pain organizations, and acted as an expert witness for plaintiffs in litigation against opioid makers.

A college student had to retract her paper. The move was ‘the starting point for a better study’

Rishika Porandla published a paper based on research she did in high school. As a sophomore at Princeton, she revisited the work — and found errors in the methodology, leading her to retract the study.

Note, August 14, 2026: See an update to this story: “Princeton student says she did not conduct the experiments described in her now-retracted paper.”

As a sophomore at Princeton University, Rishika Porandla took a course called “The Curious Scientist,” where students practice disciplinary research skills and act as a “PI” on a project of their choosing.

Porandla didn’t have to think twice about what subject to dive into. In high school, she had studied the biodegradability of polyvinyl chloride and discovered a new process to break down the plastic. The finding led to one of her proudest high school achievements — a published journal article. She was eager to use the Princeton class to advance her discovery.

From the outset, Porandla’s project for the class seemed like “a slam dunk,” Andrea DiGiorgio, the course’s instructor, told Retraction Watch.

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.

The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.

Juan Pablo Alperin, a professor at Simon Fraser University and codirector of the Scholarly Communications Lab based in Vancouver, is represented by two attorneys who have had blockbuster success in FCA cases over the past decade. He and his attorneys originally filed the case under seal in March 2024. The government declined to intervene in the case on July 23 of this year, and a judge ordered the complaint unsealed, which now allows Alperin to pursue the case independently.

Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination

Raghabendra Kumar Mahato

A preprint server has withdrawn three papers by an author at the center of a Retraction Watch story revealing a prolific research factory operated through the WhatsApp messaging system.

Last week, we reported on Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student in Nepal, who runs an international research network that churns out conference abstracts and journal papers at a rapid-fire pace. Mahato’s network includes nearly 1,000 members connected through WhatsApp and produces suspected fast-churn science, while recruiting authorship for the works. Papers by the network have been accepted by major journals and presented at conferences by leading medical societies.

On July 24, Research Square, a preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts by Mahato due to concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network,” according to notices placed on the work. The notices include a link to Retraction Watch’s investigation.

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