Avery Orrall

Paper with duplicated images retracted four months after concerns were raised

We write plenty of stories about lengthy investigations and long wait times for retractions. So we are always glad when we can highlight when journals act in a relatively timely fashion.

The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences, published by Wiley on behalf of Kaohsiung Hospital in Taiwan, seemed to exhibit some urgency after a sleuth raised concerns in December 2024 about a 2019 paper with problematic figures.

The sleuth, who has asked us to remain anonymous but goes by “Mitthyridium jungquilianum” on PubPeer, had pointed out similarities between the 2019 paper and another article by different authors, published in Oncotarget in 2014. One figure from each work was “more similar than expected” to each other, Mitthyridium wrote, citing ImageTwin.

Clarivate to stop counting citations to retracted articles in journals’ impact factors

Clarivate will no longer include citations to and from retracted papers when calculating journal impact factors, the company announced today.

The change comes after some have wondered over the years whether citations to retracted papers should count toward a journal’s impact factor, a controversial yet closely watched metric that measures how often others cite papers from that journal. For many institutions, impact factors have become a proxy for the importance of their faculty’s research.

Retractions are relatively rare and represent only 0.04% of papers indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, according to the announcement. But the overall retraction rate has risen recently, to about 0.2%, which, along with a decrease in the time it takes to retract papers, motivated the policy change. Nandita Quaderi, the editor-in-chief of Web of Science, said in the announcement the policy would “pre-emptively guard against any such time that citations to and from retracted content could contribute to widespread distortions in the [journal impact factor].”

Journal investigating placebo effect study following Retraction Watch inquiry

An Elsevier journal is investigating a paper by a controversial author after a Retraction Watch inquiry about the article. The article concluded that “placebo effects have a significant impact on observed outcomes” in both placebo and treatment groups in clinical trials.

The senior author of the paper is Harald Walach, whose name may be familiar. In one paper, now retracted, Walach and his coauthors claimed COVID-19 vaccines killed two people for every three deaths they prevented. In a different paper, also retracted, Walach and his colleagues claimed children’s masks trap carbon dioxide; they later republished the article in a different journal. He lost two papers and a university affiliation in 2021.

One of his latest papers, “Treatment effects in pharmacological clinical randomized controlled trials are mainly due to placebo,” appeared online December 27 in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.

A ‘stupid mistake’: EPA researcher added their underage child as an author on manuscript

A researcher at the Environmental Protection Agency added their underage child as a coauthor on a paper after the manuscript cleared the agency’s internal review, an investigation found.

The revelation, which calls into question the EPA’s process for reviewing papers, was among several highlighted by the agency’s Office of Inspector General in an April 8 report, which is redacted for names and identifying details.

The report cites specific concerns regarding the researcher, including that their child listed the paper among their accomplishments on college applications. These and other authorship practices revealed deeper issues with the review system at the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which the report found “lacks oversight.” The OIG recommended the office take steps to address shortcomings, as the collaborations “remained unchecked” for “several years.”

A Ph.D. in paper mills?

A university and a publisher are teaming up to combat paper mills in a unique way: By enlisting a Ph.D. candidate.

In April, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands announced it would be collaborating with Wiley to establish a four-year research position focused on paper mills.

“Of course one Ph.D. will not fix the problem,” said Cyril Labbé of Grenoble Alpes University in France, whose lab hosted a Ph.D. student in 2014 to detect computer-generated manuscripts. “But going this way is far more constructive than resorting to empty rhetoric and wooden language, as some publishers tend to do.”

‘Squared blunder’: Google engineer withdraws preprint after getting called out for using AI

Two of the phrases in the paper identified as AI-generated

An expert in AI at Google has admitted he used the technology to help write a preprint manuscript that commenters on PubPeer found to contain a slew of AI-generated phrases like “squared blunder” and “info picture.”

The paper, “Leveraging GANs For Active Appearance Models Optimized Model Fitting,” appeared on arXiv.org in January but was withdrawn April 7. The author, Anurag Awasthi, is an engineering lead in AI infrastructure at Google. In a PubPeer comment, he described the paper as a “personal learning exercise.”

In March 2025, sleuth Guillaume Cabanac, creator of the Problematic Paper Screener, pointed out in a PubPeer comment the paper included several tortured phrases. These phrases indicate AI use and occur when large language models try to find synonyms for common phrases. In Awasthi’s paper, “linear regression” became “straight relapse,” and “error rate” became “blunder rate,” among others.

UC Davis research director loses three papers for image manipulation

A lead researcher at UC Davis has lost three decades-old papers from the same journal for image duplication, and the journal says it is investigating more.

Allen Gao, director of research for the Department of Urologic Surgery at the institution is ~~first~~ last and corresponding author on the papers, published in The Prostate.

The journal retracted the articles – published in 2002, 2004 and 2009 – in February. The papers have been cited 42, 71, and 27 times respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Biochemist with previous image duplication retractions loses another paper

A researcher who retracted two papers last year following a years-long investigation has lost another, this one two decades old.

The same journal also corrected two papers for image duplication within days of the retraction.

The moves followed comments about image similarities on PubPeer. The retraction marks the third for biochemist Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Two of his papers were retracted in 2024, a process that took six years and included a four-year investigation by the university.

A ‘joke’: Paper with ‘completely irrelevant’ citations retracted

A paper that made the rounds last year for its blatantly “irrelevant” citations has now been retracted.

Elsevier’s International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published “Origin of the distinct site occupations of H atom in hcp Ti and Zr/Hf” in November 2024.

Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” One of the authors told us they included the references as a “joke” after reviewers pressured them.

All 13 of the references include Sergei Trukhanov as an author, and all but one also includes Alex Trukhanov.

Do men or women retract more? A study found the answer is … complicated

A new study compares retraction rates between men and women.
*Pexels*

Longtime Retraction Watch readers know the scientists on our Leaderboard have changed over the years. But one characteristic has remained relatively constant: There are few women on that list – in fact, ~~never~~ rarely more than one at a time.

So when a recent paper dove into whether retraction rates vary by the gender of the authors, we were curious what the authors found.

The team, from Sorbonne Study Group on Methods of Sociological Analysis (GEMASS) in Paris, sampled 1 million articles from the OpenAlex database, then referenced the Retraction Watch database to compare against their sample.

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