While reading a chapter from a 2024 book on restoring biodiversity in post-industrial land earlier this month, an ecologist came across a reference to a study on rewilding she wanted to look up.
But the ecologist, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the chapter authors, couldn’t find a record of the 2020 paper, purportedly published in Ambio by “Knijn et al.” She decided to check the other references. She told Retraction Watch she found at least eight that didn’t exist.
The ecologist flagged the issue to the book’s publisher, Wiley, on September 7 but told us she never heard back, aside from an automated response.
Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) has retracted 165 papers this year, most for “suspicious” changes in authorship or editorial conflicts of interest.
The retractions have come after STOTEN was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November after the index put it on hold due to concerns about article quality. The journal published over 10,000 articles in 2024; so far this year it has published fewer than 1,000.
The retractions, most of which were issued in August, applied to articles published from 2018 to 2025. At least 50 of the papers were handled by associate editors who had “an ongoing collaboration on a co-publication” or “an extensive record of collaboration” with the authors of the articles, according to the notices.
A psychology journal has retracted a paper on how using generative AI can affect confidence in work tasks after its sole author refused to share data with the editors.
The April paper, published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA), purported to describe the results of a survey of 1,923 adults recruited online to perform AI-assisted tasks. The paper was featured in an APA press release and articles in TIME and Futurism.
As we wrote in June, experts in the field began flagging issues with the paper’s data on PubPeer shortly after it was published. Sandra Grinschgl, who studies human-technology interaction at the University of Bern in Switzerland, was the first to do so, and later enlisted the help of colleagues Ian Hussey and Malte Elson. Their concerns included inconsistencies in graphs and results, study design, “erroneous” references and a lack of ethics approval.
All 15 editors at a French journal have resigned after it was acquired by an editing service and publisher based in China.
Revue de l’Organisation Responsable, or Responsible Organization Review (ROR), publishes articles related to “critical reflection on developments in today’s capitalism,” according to its website. Previously published by Editions ESKA, the journal was founded in 2006 and is supported by the Réseau International de Recherche sur les Organisations et le Développement Durable (RIODD), a social science association. It is indexed in SCImago and Scopus, but not in Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In a letter posted to the journal’s LinkedIn page on September 4, the editors resigned immediately from their duties “with great indignation and emotion.” They said the editorial board was informed at the end of August ESKA had sold publishing and distribution rights to the editing service CNBesting Inc.
The authors of a June 2025 paper in Nature estimated the contribution of atmospheric evaporative demand on the severity of droughts worldwide, as shown in this figure from the article. The journal retracted the article on Sept. 2. S.H. Gebrechorkos et al./Nature 2025
Nature has retracted a paper on the atmosphere’s role in the severity of droughts around the world after the authors discovered they made a coding error that skewed their measurements. The authors say they’ve already written a revised version of the paper.
The article, published in June 2025, found an increase in “atmospheric thirst,” or atmospheric evaporative demand — a measure of how much water the atmosphere draws from rivers, lakes, soil and so on — has exacerbated the severity of droughts by about 40%. The New York Times covered the work, claiming the study found atmospheric thirst “played an even bigger role than previously thought” in drought severity. The paper has been cited 337 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
But the authors discovered “a calculation error” that was “not related to our data or methodology, but a coding error,” lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos told Retraction Watch in a statement sent by the University of Oxford in England. Of the 11 authors on the paper, three, including Gebrechorkos and senior author Simon Dadson, are affiliated with the university.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
