Avery Orrall

Author forges document to claim USDA affiliation

A journal has retracted three papers after an investigation revealed one of the authors falsely claimed he was affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture.

All three retraction notices, issued February 13 by the Journal of Environmental Management, state study coauthor Tariq Shah claimed affiliation with the USDA Plant Science Research Unit. “When asked about these issues during an editorial investigation, Shah’s responses caused the editor to further lose confidence in the validity/integrity of the article,” the notices say.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us in an email “Shah provided a document claiming to show his official affiliation with USDA that we later learned through our investigation was forged.” Neither Shah nor Elsevier clarified what the document was.

IQ paper gets expression of concern as misconduct fallout continues

The authors of a paper on how incentives influence IQ have requested an expression of concern after a recent retraction altered the results of their study.

On January 20, we reported that a paper by embattled researcher and child psychologist Stephen Breuning was retracted decades after an investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct. Breuning’s papers came into question following a 1987 report from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which found he “knowingly, willfully, and repeatedly” engaged in research misconduct and fabricated results in 10 NIMH funded articles.

Since then, six of Breuning’s papers have been retracted. The latest retracted article, originally published in 1978, was not part of the investigation but came about “due to concerns about the integrity of the data reported and other issues identified within the NIMH Final Report that clearly established a pattern of ongoing scientific misconduct,” the retraction notice read.

Paper on conversion therapy retracted, authors planning to republish

A four-year-old paper claiming conversion therapy reduced same-sex thoughts in gay men has been retracted after criticism from other researchers prompted further review of the work.

“Efficacy and risk of sexual orientation change efforts: a retrospective analysis of 125 exposed men,” published in F1000Research in March 2021, found conversion therapy (referred to in the paper as sexual orientation change efforts) was “effective and safe.”

F1000Research is an open publishing platform where peer review takes place after publication. The title is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science but does appear in Scopus, which reports the paper was cited seven times.

Wiley journal retracts 26 papers for ‘compromised peer review’

A Wiley journal has retracted more than two dozen articles in the last few months for peer review issues.

The articles, which appeared in Environmental Toxicology, have been retracted in batches, the latest on February 16-17, with previous sets in January and November.

The retraction notices of all 26 papers read in part:

When a sleuth gets hired by a publisher: A Q&A with Nick Wise

Nick Wise had a prolific start to his sleuthing journey. In July 2021, the fluid dynamics researcher started looking for tortured phrases in published papers, and has since had a hand in at least 1,000 retractions. He also helped identify unique phrases for the Tortured Phrases Detector, a function of the Problematic Paper Screener that identifies signs of misconduct. Last month, Wise teamed up with other research fraud hunters in a Nature article that outlined “five essential steps to combat industrialized scientific misconduct.”

His success in calling out research misconduct helped him land a full-time job. In January, Wise started a new position as research integrity manager at publisher Taylor & Francis. We spoke with him about how his new position will impact his career trajectory and how he plans to use his sleuthing past in his new position.

Two papers coauthored by a dean retracted, with a third in question

Two papers on a novel approach for flood prediction have been retracted for “substantial overlap” between the works. The authors, including Debopam Acharya, dean of the School of Computing at DIT University in Uttarakhand, India, are contesting both retractions.

The articles, published in 2023, are “FLOODALERT: an internet of things based real-time flash flood tracking and prediction system,” which appeared in Multimedia Tools and Applications, and “An IoT-based system for monitoring and forecasting flash floods in real-time,” from Journal of Earth System Science. They have been cited seven and five times, respectively.

The articles were retracted after a concerned researcher, who also reached out to Retraction Watch, emailed each journal about problems with the papers.

As Springer Nature journal clears AI papers, one university’s retractions rise drastically

Neurosurgical Review has begun retracting scores of commentaries and letters to the editor after getting inundated by AI-generated manuscripts. At the top of the affiliations list: Saveetha University in Chennai, India, an institution that, as we reported with Science in 2023, engages in aggressive self-citation.

At publication time, Neurosurgical Review had retracted 129 papers so far this year. The journal, a Springer Nature publication, paused acceptance of letters to the editor and commentaries last fall.

In December we reported in another collaboration with Science that Neurosurgical Review paused accepting commentaries and letters to the editor last year after getting overwhelmed by submissions that appeared to be generated using large language models (LLMs).

Sage journal retracts another 400 papers

Sage has retracted 416 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), which had a mass retraction of over 450 papers last August.

Before the mass retraction last year, which we covered, Sage paused publication of new articles from the journal, which it acquired when it bought IOS Press in 2023. The journal is now accepting new submissions, according to a Sage spokesperson.

The retraction notice mentions citation and referencing “anomalies,” “incoherent, extraneous text and tortured phrases” and “unverifiable authors and reviewers,” among other signs of misconduct. “These indicators raise concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process underlying the following articles. The Publisher regrets that these were not flagged during the journal’s editorial and peer review processes,” the notice reads.

Most of the researchers are from universities in India and China.

Anatomy of a retraction: When cleaning up the literature takes six years

In 2018, a biochemist in Scotland became aware of image irregularities in two of his papers through comments on PubPeer, each in a different journal. The researcher, Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee, said he alerted his home institution immediately.

In July and October 2024, the papers were retracted.

Emails obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request show what happened in the intervening six years: Consecutive investigations by Dundee and a funder, then delays as the journals juggled conflicting narratives. In the meantime, the papers continued racking up citations.

Journal updates retraction notice to include plagiarism following Retraction Watch report

The editor-in-chief of a journal updated a retraction notice to acknowledge the data in the paper were “completely plagiarized” following allegations in a letter to the editor that were the subject of a Retraction Watch post last week.

The original retraction, requested by the authors, cited only “major errors in data.” The notice for the October 2023 paper, which is signed by the Indian Journal for Critical Care Medicine (IJCCM) editor-in-chief Atul Kulkarni, now reads:

Following scrutiny of the article further and other facts brought to the notice of the IJCCM, I have decided to change the reason for the retraction. This article is withdrawn after having been found that the data was completely plagiarized (in toto) from the work of another researcher.

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