Avery Orrall

In what EIC calls an ‘honest mistake,’ journal approves paper without peer reviewing it

For most researchers, having an article accepted comes with constructive feedback from editors and reviewers. But when a sociology researcher learned his article was accepted at a Taylor & Francis journal, he was surprised to find the journal had skipped the peer review process altogether.

Martino C. submitted his article on the effects of economic instability on political ideology in Slovakia to the journal Democracy and Security on October 15. (We’ve withheld the author’s last name at his request for digital privacy reasons.) He told Retraction Watch he was hoping peer reviews would help him improve his argument.

But on January 13, the paper was marked “Accepted” in the journal’s submission portal without feedback.

Critics of birdsong study fight to be named in Nature’s retraction

A zebra finch in New South Wales, Australia. *Source: JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)*

Researchers who flagged methodological issues in a paper on birdsong a year and a half before Nature retracted it say they should be credited in the editorial notice. But the editors have refused, with one telling the critics the paper was retracted for unrelated reasons.

The March 2024 study at the center of the dispute looked at how sexual selection may drive song patterns in male zebra finches. Nature retracted the paper last month because two of the synthetic song pairs used in the study were found to be unreliable, according to the notice. All three authors agreed to the retraction.

Todd Roberts, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch the critics now asking for credit “prompted us to check the synthetic song pairs used in our paper.” He said his team did not do the reliability analysis of the pairs until after publication.

Widely criticized keto diet study retracted

A 2025 paper claiming the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques has been retracted after widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims. The journal found “the identified errors are too great to be corrected with a corrigendum,” according to the March 11 retraction notice.

In April 2025, JACC: Advances published the study, which looked at plaque build-up in 100 otherwise generally healthy people who had experienced an increase in their cholesterol levels while being on a keto diet. The study claimed scans performed one year apart by the company Cleerly showed the diet was not associated with the development of arterial plaques.

This finding went against what previous studies had found, and it led to what Wired called “a new war in the nutrition world.”

Nine years after journalist raised concerns, BMJ Group journal retracts stent paper

A BMJ Group journal has retracted a paper nearly nine years after a journalist raised concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest and the study’s details contradicting those of its trial registration. The researchers also excluded a patient’s death from the study, the retraction notice says.

The study, published in Open Heart in May 2017, described the results of a clinical trial that tested commercially available stents with microengineered grooves produced by Abbott Vascular.

But four months later, veteran cardiology journalist Larry Husten pointed out the clinical trial registration described a plan to employ two stents produced by a different device maker – Palmaz Scientific, a company that funded the work and was owned by one of the authors. He also wrote that records “indicate that one patient in the trial died as a result of pancreatitis. It seems unlikely that this was related to the stent but shouldn’t this information have been reported in the Open Heart paper?”

Elsevier journal removes two 42-year-old papers on cesium as a cancer treatment

An Elsevier journal has removed two papers on a discredited alternative treatment for cancer nearly half a century after they were published, after researchers found a quarter of patients in case reports of the therapy, cesium chloride, died from taking the substance.

Some alternative medicine advocates marketed cesium chloride as a cancer treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, although the risks and ineffectiveness of the therapy have been known for decades. In 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about “significant safety risks” associated with the salt.

Marcel van der Heyden, a professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, told Retraction Watch he and his students came across the articles while writing a review of case reports on the use of cesium. Although the therapy was supported online and in health books, he said, all pointed to two 1984 papers in Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior: “Cesium therapy in cancer patients” by Hellfried Sartori and “The high pH therapy for cancer tests on mice and humans” by Aubrey Keith Brewer.

One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

*Figure from correspondence to* The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today.

The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828. The researchers, led by Maxim Topaz of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, used AI to “distinguish genuine fabrications from formatting discrepancies such as informally abbreviated titles.”

Topaz’s group located the sharpest increase in hallucinated references in mid-2024, which they note coincided with the rise of AI writing tools. The findings come as Nature reported last month that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 “might include invalid references generated by AI.” Retraction Watch has seen its fair share of reports of hallucinated citations generated by LLMs like ChatGPT.

Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds

Among the data analyzed were mean monthly citations per article for 151 papers that were retracted or issued some other editorial notice, and for a set of control articles. The solid vertical lines are median time to the peak citation month, and the dashed line is median time to the editorial notice.
*H. Studd et al/medRxiv 2026*

Neither retractions, expressions of concern, nor other editorial notices seem to keep authors from continuing to cite problematic papers, according to a look at what happened to more than 170 articles by one author.

“After the public notification of integrity concerns about an article, it would be expected that other authors would no longer cite the article because it is unreliable,” write the authors of a new preprint. But that’s not what they found in a limited comparative study. Whether the study is generalizable has yet to be seen, says one other expert.

Four sleuths – the University of Aberdeen’s Hugo Studd and Alison Avenell and the University of Auckland’s Andrew Grey and Mark J. Bolland – charted citation data for 172 papers on clinical trials from Zatollah Asemi, a nutrition researcher at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, whose work has come under scrutiny.

Journal goes dark after impersonating Eric Topol and others

Within hours of researchers from prestigious institutions discovering they were listed as authors on a fabricated paper, the website for the journal and publisher has been taken down.

Cardiologist Eric Topol, the executive vice president of Scripps Research, posted on X yesterday that his name appeared on a “fraudulent” paper published in the so-called Journal of Digital Health Implementation. He suspected the article, dated March 29 and titled “Implementation Science for AI Integration in Digital Health Systems,” was AI-generated.

“If there ever was an AI-generated paper, this one would qualify as a high probability of being so,” Topol, who is also founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Retraction Watch.

‘I asked him to stop’: Father adds daughter’s name to over 100 preprints without her permission

An author in China with nearly 500 preprints has continued to add his daughter’s name to papers – despite her insistence she was not involved.

Shifa Liu, whose papers list affiliations with Peking University in China, has posted 499 works (and counting) on topics in physics and mathematics. His daughter, an undergraduate at an American university, is listed as a coauthor on over 100 of those preprints. In some cases, she was even named as the corresponding author. (Retraction Watch is not naming the daughter to respect her privacy and will not be accepting comments that name her.)

The daughter told Retraction Watch she “did not participate in the research, writing, or submission of any of these papers,” adding her father included her name “without my knowledge or consent.”

45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’

Forty-five of 48 members of the editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory resigned earlier this month for what they called Elsevier’s “concerning and potentially detrimental” decisions regarding the publication.

Paul Nevai, formerly a professor at The Ohio State University, was appointed editor-in-chief of JAT in 1990 and held the position for 35 years until December. That’s when he reached the end of his term and Elsevier informed him they’d be filling the position with someone else.

The mass resignation came after what Nevai said were several years of bad blood between the editors of the journal (including him) and the publisher, Giampiero Accardo. A representative for Elsevier told us designated publishers like Accardo are Elsevier employees who “oversee a portfolio of academic journals within a subject area, working closely with editors, authors, and research communities to support their development and long-term success.”

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