Avery Orrall

Editors of economics journal resign after Elsevier doesn’t renew EIC’s contract

Six editors and nearly 60 advisory editors of Games and Economic Behavior resigned after the journal’s publisher decided not to renew the editor-in-chief’s contract.

In late July, Elsevier told Hervé Moulin, a business professor of the University of Glasgow, his six-year tenure as editor-in-chief of the journal would end in December. Moulin told Retraction Watch he was disappointed by the news, as he had expressed a desire to continue in his role.

The journal’s six editors resigned in the weeks following, according to an August 16 email, the text of which is also posted on the website for the Game Theory Society. Games and Economic Behavior is one of the group’s two official journals. As of August 19, 58 of the 62 advisory editors had resigned as well.

Ceramics journal pulls dozens of papers flagged for integrity concerns

A materials science journal has pulled 56 papers so far this year for transgressions including image overlap, concerns about data integrity and “suspicious” changes in authorship.

Ceramics International began retracting the papers in July. More than 50 of the retractions were requested by an “impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics advisor,” according to the notices.

Most of the retraction notices – 43 – reference PubPeer comments calling out issues with the work. In emails we have seen, scientific sleuth Mu Yang flagged 80 papers from Ceramics International to the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, on April 23, 2025.

Sage issues dozens of retractions from two journals it acquired

In recent weeks Sage has retracted batches of articles published in two journals it acquired from IOS Press in 2023. In each case, the retractions were for manipulation of, and concerns about, peer review.

The first tranche of papers was retracted July 15 from Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS) and constituted 43 papers, some of which had been presented at a conference in Türkiye. According to the retraction notice, after an internal investigation, Sage “became aware that the submissions contain indicators of third-party involvement and attempts to manipulate the peer-review process” in the special issue.

The second batch of retractions applied to 34 papers in the International Journal of Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Engineering Systems from 2017 to 2025. The August 5 notice cites suspicion of third party involvement, peer review issues, citation manipulation and non-standard language, including tortured phrases, as reasons for retracting the articles. Tortured phrases can indicate plagiarism.

Biology journal pulls 100+ articles and counting from special issues for peer review manipulation

Elsevier’s International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has issued more than 100 retractions and counting for manipulated peer review in guest-edited special issues. The publisher has said one more retraction is coming.

Since June the publisher has retracted 120 papers. According to the retraction notices, the journal identified “[s]ystematic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process.”

A spokesperson for Elsevier told Retraction Watch the publisher “became aware of possible systematic manipulation and other issues such as plagiarism, image duplication, and authorship issues in a number of articles published in Special Issues” in 2025, which led them to conduct a wider investigation into more recent special issues.

BMJ Group retracts paper on COVID-19 vaccines and mortality featured in Senate hearing

BMJ Public Health has retracted a paper some — including a witness at a recent U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing — have used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths. The action comes more than two years after a researcher cited in the work flagged issues with the study.

Published May 6, 2024, the paper used the “Our World in Data” database and the World Mortality Dataset to look at COVID-19 related deaths during the height of the pandemic. News outlets covered it, from The Telegraph — “vaccines may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” — to the New York Post, which quoted the paper’s statements about reported “serious injuries and deaths following vaccination,” a move it later corrected.

An expression of concern, placed on the paper about a month after it was published, attempted to quell these claims, noting the study “does not establish any such link.” The notice also announced an institutional investigation by the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands, where three of the four authors worked, including corresponding author Saskia Mostert.

Clarivate removes hold on mega-journal Heliyon after internal audit, 650+ retractions

Clarivate has lifted its hold on Heliyon after the journal’s internal audit led to over 1,000 retractions, expressions of concern and corrections. As a result, the journal will receive an impact factor in the coming cycle, a Clarivate spokesperson said.

Clarivate decided in September 2024 new content from Heliyon would not be indexed in its Web of Science due to concerns about quality. The journal told us at the time it was “investigating,” and since then, it has retracted over 650 articles.

Clarivate lifted the hold on May 14, and Heliyon released a statement shortly after, noting all content published while the journal was on hold will now be indexed. The statement says the audit “revealed behaviors that did not align with our policies.” As we wrote in February, the journal has previously said the concerning practices included compromised peer review, authorship irregularities, tortured phrases and citation manipulation.

A composer published a paper on theoretical physics. His lack of credentials drew criticism.

Some people compose music or make YouTube videos for a hobby. That’s Brandon Yates’ job — so in his spare time, he tries his hand at theoretical physics. But his only published paper was questioned because of his lack of professional training in the field — despite the physicist who inspired his work saying the work looks legitimate.

Based in Las Vegas, Yates earns a living as a composer for the animated series called “Death Battle.” He also has had an “intuitive understanding of, and love for, General Relativity for as long as I can remember,” he told Retraction Watch. But he has no formal training in physics and is self-taught, he said.

After watching a video lecture series online by Canadian physicist Eric Poisson, in January, Yates built a computer algebra program to look into rules in general relativity used to fuse two spacetimes across a thin shell, Yates said. By March, he had come across a conditional result he believed to be novel.

Editors of economics journal resign after association renews Taylor & Francis contract

Forty-one editors, associate editors and advisory board members resigned from their roles at the Review of Social Economy after the Association for Social Economics, which owns the journal, renewed its contract with publisher Taylor & Francis.

The resigning members, who cited concerns the publisher would eventually transition the journal to a model based wholly on author publishing fees as a reason for their departure, say they plan to launch their own publication. ASE, however, denies the journal plans to fully rely on author publishing charges.

The four coeditors of the journal resigned on July 4, according to an email to the ASE we have seen. Former editor Roberto Veneziani, economics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said that happened two days after the association decided to renew its contract with Taylor & Francis. On July 10, 37 associate editors and advisory board members also resigned, noting they shared the values of the coeditors.

Harvard cancer researchers earn retraction for image duplication

A group of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have lost a paper for image duplication following an investigation by the two institutions.

The paper, published in September 2019 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, described a treatment for tumors caused by a disorder called tuberous sclerosis complex. Several of the article’s 12 authors are affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine division. Corresponding author David Kwiatkowski is an oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

The research was partially funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and a National Institutes of Health grant, the latter of which was awarded to Kwiatkowski.

Sage retracts eight papers by former Radboud ‘rising star’ for compromised peer-review process

The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited.

Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep. The retraction applies to eight of the 25 papers Griep coauthored in the journal, according to the July 14 retraction notice. The papers were retracted for a “compromised” peer-review process, the notice states.

“As the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles, the objectivity of the peer-review process has been compromised,” reads a publisher’s note published alongside the retractions. The move “relates to the underlying review process and no determination has been made regarding the scientific content of the articles.”

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