Avery Orrall

BMJ places expression of concern on heavily criticized stem cell paper

The BMJ has issued an expression of concern for a paper claiming stem cell therapy can reduce the risk of heart failure. The move comes after sleuths and scientists critiqued the “complete mismatch” between the study data and the article itself.

As we reported last week, the October 29 paper included results of a phase III clinical trial in Shiraz, Iran. Critics quickly began pointing out discrepancies in the data on PubPeer, including psychologist Nick Brown, who pointed out a “curious repeating pattern of records in the dataset” every 101 records.

According to the expression of concern published today, The BMJ acknowledged issues “apparent from the data that support the paper” including data irregularities, discrepancies in the age criteria and the ages of participants included in the study, and undeclared conflicts of interest.

Journal retracts ‘bizarre’ placebo effect paper

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in December 2024, analyzed 30 clinical trials examining treatments for a total of five conditions. The authors concluded “the placebo-effect is the major driver of treatment effects in clinical trials that alone explains 69% of the variance.” It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The last author of the study is Harald Walach, who may be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch. In one now-retracted paper, Walach and his coauthors claimed the COVID-19 vaccines killed two people for every three deaths they prevented. In a different, also retracted paper, Walach and colleagues claimed children’s masks trap carbon dioxide. (They later republished the article in a different journal.)

Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study

A week after The BMJ published a highly publicized paper claiming stem cell therapy can reduce the risk of heart failure, sleuths have unearthed what they are calling “serious” inconsistencies in the data.

The paper claims the phase III clinical trial published October 29 included over 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, and tested whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack.

The results were celebrated in a press release by the journal and appeared in several news outlets, with New Scientist calling the study the “strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself.”

Review mill in Italy targeting ob-gyn journals, researchers allege

Examples of “boilerplate” text used in the suspect reviews.
*M.A. Oviedo-Garcia et al/medRxiv 2025*

A network of peer reviewers in Italy is targeting medical journals, threatening “both the scientific record and patient safety,” a team of researchers report. Without more transparency by journals, they say, most review mills will remain impossible to detect.

In a preprint posted on medRxiv on October 23, sleuths Dorothy Bishop, René Aquarius and Maria Ángeles Oviedo-García say they discovered the alleged review mill when they stumbled upon seemingly “boilerplate” comments in a peer review. This discovery led the trio to search for published peer reviews that shared similar terminology — work that ultimately identified 195 suspect reviews of 170 articles published between Feb. 6, 2019, and July 7, 2025. The researchers speculate the number of articles affected is likely higher given most journals do not publish their peer reviews.

The alleged mill is run by “well-established, Italian physicians in the fields of gynecology and oncology,” wrote the authors of the new study, which also noted the reviewers were refereeing papers with clinical implications, a pattern the authors called “alarming.”

Dozens of board members resign from big-data journal after mass staff firings

More than three-fifths of the editorial board of a biomedical sciences journal resigned after the publication’s operations moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China, and the editors and software team were fired with 30 days’ notice.

GigaScience is published in partnership between Oxford University Press and GigaScience Press, the publishing division of BGI, a genomics company based in Shenzhen, according to their website.

On October 29, B.F. Francis Ouellette, a bioinformatics consultant, sent the resignation notice in an email addressed to Oxford University Press and the new editor-in-chief of the journal, Xun Xu. According to the email, which was signed by 30 of the journal’s 49 board members, those resigning became “increasingly concerned about the recent structural and editorial changes at GigaScience and how they may affect the journal’s long-standing commitment to publishing rigorously reviewed, reproducible research.”

Former Australian science agency ecology researcher loses two papers

One of the retracted papers proposed an epigenetic clock to estimate the age of sea turtles.
*Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0*)

A molecular ecology researcher has lost two papers and received an expression of concern for a third after coauthors flagged data issues with the papers.

All three papers appeared in Molecular Ecology Resources and describe the use of DNA methylation as an epigenetic clock to predict the age of different animals. The journal retracted two of the studies in July. The first, published in June 2021, estimated ages for three threatened fish species. The second appeared in April 2022 and proposes a clock for predicting the age of sea turtles. The articles have been cited 41 and 32 times, respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The lead author on those two studies was Benjamin Mayne, formerly a researcher at Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), based in Canberra.

Embattled journal Cureus delisted from Web of Science, loses impact factor

Clarivate has removed the mega-journal Cureus from its Master Journal List, according to the October update, released today.

The move means Cureus will no longer be indexed in Web of Science or receive an impact factor. As we have reported, it can also mean researchers are less likely to submit to the journal, given universities rely on such metrics to judge researchers’ work for tenure and promotion decisions.

Clarivate put indexing for the journal on hold last September for concerns about article quality, which the journal has been criticized for in the past.

Despite new retractions, suspect organ transplant papers remain in the literature

Six years after researchers called for the retraction of more than 400 papers about organ transplantation amid suspicion the organs used in the studies came from executed Chinese prisoners, journals are still working to clear the record.

Although more than 40 papers were retracted or otherwise flagged shortly after the 2019 study was published, by our count, only 44 of the 445 papers have been retracted to date. At least 17 of the articles marked with expressions of concern in 2019-2020 remain as such.

The analysis, published in BMJ Open, found more than 400 studies of organ transplants in China that didn’t report whether the sources gave their consent for donation, nor assurances the organs involved did not come from executed prisoners. As reported by The Guardian in 2019, the study exposed “a mass failure of English language medical journals to comply with international ethical standards in place to ensure organ donors provide consent for transplantation.” Thirteen retractions this year directly cite the Rogers paper.

Exclusive: American Heart Association reviewing award to rocket scientist with seven retractions

The American Heart Association is reviewing its decision to give an award to the architect of a controversial theory that is the subject of ~~eight~~ seven retracted papers, Retraction Watch has learned. In the meantime, the researcher is using the award to contest several of the retractions.

The Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award “recognizes the team of authors with the highest-ranked scientific abstract from every participating country for each AHA scientific meeting,” according to the award website.

At its Basic Cardiovascular Sciences 2025 conference in July, the association gave the award for best abstract from India to work describing “Sanal flow choking” theory, which is named after lead author, V. R. Sanal Kumar, a professor of aerospace engineering at Amity University in New Delhi. As we have previously reported, some scientists have denounced the concept as “absolute nonsense” and “inaccurate and paradoxical” — and earlier this year, a journal said it “fundamentally violates” a law of thermodynamics.

Exclusive: Journal to retract Alzheimer’s study after investigation finds misconduct

A journal says it will retract a 2019 paper on an Alzheimer’s treatment after an institutional investigation found research misconduct, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch. The move comes four years after another investigation by the same university uncovered image duplication in a different paper by a similar group of authors.

The paper, published in Biological Psychiatry, describes the potential of an apoE antagonist for treatment in Alzheimer’s disease.

A 2019 news release by the University of South Florida, home to several of the researchers involved in the study, called the work “promising.” Lead author Darrell Sawmiller, an assistant professor at USF, said the study represented “the first time … we have direct evidence” apoE “acts as an essential molecule” in the mechanisms leading to Alzheimer’s.

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