Alicia Gallegos

Federal U.S. judge tosses $1 billion defamation lawsuit against Elsevier

A district judge has ended a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier over a study about air purification technology after concluding the plaintiff’s evidence was too weak to take to trial.

Global Plasma Solutions, which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a paper in Building and Environment about the company’s needlepoint bipolar ionization technology. GPS claimed Elsevier was responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that led to “massive” financial losses for the company, according to its complaint. GPS, which now goes by GPS Air, claimed Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” but still published the paper.

On Oct. 22, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina tossed out the suit. Judge Kenneth Bell wrote in his order there was “insufficient evidence” for a jury to conclude Elsevier acted with malice. “Actual malice” requires a plaintiff to prove the alleged defamatory statement was made with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard,” which GPS could not support, according to Bell.

Journal updates retraction notice as Princeton student author stays in the spotlight

A Wiley journal has corrected a retraction notice to clarify the author, a Princeton student, never conducted the study in the first place, as the student has gained publicity for visits to the offices of Texas Congressional delegation.

The paper, by Rishika Porandla, purportedly described a new way to break down polyvinyl chloride plastic by mixing it with gold nanoparticles and blasting it with an electron beam. Macromolecular Materials and Engineering retracted the study this May after Porandla, an astrophysics student at Princeton who completed the study while in high school, notified editors of methodological errors in the work.

But following an Aug.10 Retraction Watch story highlighting Porandla’s decision to retract her own paper after she contacted us about her initiative to “correct the scientific record,” commenters on our site and on PubPeer raised doubts about whether the experiments described in the study were genuine. Porandla later told us she never conducted the experiments.

Paper touted by MD Anderson gets expression of concern for data ‘concerns’

A 2025 paper identified a protein (stained in brown) that plays a role in bone metastases.
*Image courtesy of Li Ma via MD Anderson*

Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern over “a series” of data concerns in a paper lauded by MD Anderson Cancer Center last year for identifying “a new driver” of bone metastasis.

The article, published in May 2025, has been the subject of a long and growing thread on PubPeer since April, where critics have been raising concerns about numerous images that appear to have been duplicated. The majority of the paper’s 22 authors are affiliated with MD Anderson in Houston, with at least two authors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

In June, the journal issued a correction to the paper, stating the authors “identified errors” during cross-checking of the original data, including incorrect and misplaced images.

OpenAI withdraws three preprints a day after releasing 722 manuscripts on unsolved math problems

Less than 24 hours after OpenAI posted over 700 preprints describing major math results by an internal AI model, the company has withdrawn three of the manuscripts for errors.

On Oct. 6, OpenAI published 722 preprints in a GitHub repository about purported progress in solving 372 math problems in geometry, computer science, algebra and other subjects. The company called the release an effort “to push the frontier of human knowledge and enable further progress in mathematics.”

But on Oct. 7, OpenAI announced the withdrawal of three manuscripts because of a sign error. The error invalidated an argument in one manuscript and the construction used by two dependent papers, according to the announcement. Each of the withdrawn papers carry notices explaining “the gap,” and that OpenAI has “revised 14 other manuscripts with proof repairs, corrected statements, clearer hypotheses and dependencies, and one correction to an obsolete citation.”

That an error cascaded into three of the OpenAI manuscripts is not surprising, said Alex Townsend, an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca. He suspects there will be more errors found, he said.

Editor-in-chief resigns amid probes of alleged citation manipulation, data errors

The editor-in-chief of The Egyptian Rheumatologist has resigned following claims of questionable citation practices and improper peer review at the journal.

At least three publishers are also investigating alleged data errors in papers in other journals by the former journal editor, Tamer Gheita, and his research group. Gheita, a professor of rheumatology at Cairo University in Giza, has denied the claims, calling the complaints “subjective” and “malicious.”

The Egyptian Society of Rheumatic Diseases (ESRd) started investigating Gheita in June following concerns about his editorial practices at the society’s journal, including unusually rapid peer-review timelines and questionable citation patterns, according to Bassel Elzorkany, interim editor-in-chief for the journal. Elzorkany told Retraction Watch the ESRd board temporarily suspended Gheita, and Gheita resigned shortly afterward.

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.

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