U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
The U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services is once again questioning a publisher on an editorial action regarding a paper on vaccination.
Published in Sage Open Medicine in 2020, the article looks at health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Its authors are Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, both longtime vaccine critics.
Sage Open Medicine put an expression of concern on the paper on May 18. “The following article is under investigation,” it reads. “This expression of concern will remain in place until the investigation concludes, and a final decision has been made.”
Cochrane has implemented a new system for checking whether any of its thousands of published reviews include retracted studies in their analyses, the organization announced today. The effort already has turned up dozens of reviews that do and will now get closer scrutiny to ensure their results and recommendations hold up.
Cochrane publishes systematic reviews on health-related topics that evaluate the strength of evidence on particular treatments and interventions. Professional organizations and policymakers use the more than 9,500 reviews when developing recommendations. Recently a study of anesthesia clinical trials found a high rate of the studies with faked or flawed data, and another revealed that retracted studies included in systematic reviews — 17% of which were Cochrane reviews — had a large impact on clinical guidelines derived from them.
Last year, Cochrane rolled out a feature in its database of reports of clinical trials, called CENTRAL, to flag retracted studies. The publisher pulls data on retracted papers from the Retraction Watch Database, via CrossRef. Now, they have extended the process to routinely identify systematic reviews that rely on retracted papers.
An appeals court in Switzerland has overturned a 2025 defamation conviction against a sleuth who had identified dozens of conference proceedings with signs of citation manipulation. The ruling orders the plaintiff to pay the sleuth’s legal expenses.
The judgment clears Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, in a lawsuit filed against him in 2023 by Shadi Aljawarneh, a computer scientist at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
The case stemmed from a blog post Pirelli published in January 2023 summarizing problems with the proceedings of conferences organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Aljawarneh was the chair of most of the conferences, and the proceedings included signs of citation stuffing in Aljawarneh’s favor.
If you are at all familiar with scientific sleuthing, you’re familiar with Elisabeth Bik. She is quoted so often in the mainstream media it is probably difficult to imagine a time before her supersense for spotting similarities in images wasn’t making headlines.
But it was 10 years ago, on April 19, 2016, when she made her debut, when we covered her work screening more than 20,000 biomedical research papers containing western blots. She and coauthors Ferric Fang – a member of the board of directors of our parent nonprofit organization, The Center for Scientific Integrity, and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – and Arturo Casadevall, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, posted the work as a preprint on bioRxiv.org and it appeared two months later in mBio.
The preprint was a shot across the bow for journals and publishers, and in the decade since, Bik has advised and mentored others doing similar work. In 2024, she won the Einstein Foundation Award for “identifying misconduct and potential fraud in scientific publications, highlighting science’s problems policing itself.” She donated the proceeds to The Center for Scientific Integrity to create a fund to help other sleuths do their work.
Bik spoke with us earlier this month about the paper, sleuthing and more. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.
Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.
The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.
Corrections to retractions have also been around longer than AI tools like the one that created this image. DALL-E
While large language models are taking the blame for hallucinations, punctuation and all manner of language choices these days, turns of phrase were being tortured well before the arrival of LLMs.
Overlooking that fact seems to have led to a recent correction to a retraction – yes, you read that right – in Sage’s Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology. The original article, published in February 2022, was on detecting coronary artery plaques. It contained several known tortured phrases, synonyms and rephrasings — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors.
For instance, the paper used the term “cardiovascular breakdown” for “heart failure”; “outward appearance acknowledgement” instead of “face recognition”; and “attractive resonance” for “magnetic resonance.”
The Lancet has put an expression of concern on a 2006 case report of a baby’s death purportedly from morphine poisoning through breast milk. The decision comes just days after the New Yorker published a year-long investigation into the death and the controversies that have surrounded it.
The case report described the 2005 death of a baby boy whose mother had been prescribed Tylenol 3, which contains codeine. Gideon Koren, founder of the now-defunct Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, used the case for years to claim codeine – which gets metabolized to morphine in the body – can pose a lethal risk to breastfeeding infants.
“It feels like an element of vindication,” David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, told Retraction Watch of the expression of concern. Juurlink, a pharmacologist and toxicologist who has been pursuing this case for over a decade, requested The Lancet retract the article in 2020, when he and a colleague published a review article calling into question key elements of the case report. The paper, he said, “really does serve as the foundation of an entire branch of pediatric pharmacology that shouldn’t exist.”
We’ve seen all kinds of articles that got published despite having references that don’t exist. But this was a new one: a paper with a made-up reference to the journal in which it appears.
While nonexistent references can indicate the use of a large language model in generating text, the authors maintain they used AI according to the journal’s guidelines.
The letter to the editor, published in December 2024 in Intensive Care Medicine, explored ways AI could help clinicians monitor blood circulation in patients in intensive care units. The 750-word letter included 15 references.
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has been relatively quiet in 2025, releasing just two misconduct findings with only two weeks remaining in the year — the fewest the office has released since at least 2006. ORI typically releases an average of about 10 findings a year.
The office, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, oversees research integrity and misconduct for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other HHS agencies. Its team of scientist-investigators review institutional inquiries and investigate possible research misconduct for a portfolio of publicly funded biomedical research that totals tens of billions of dollars.
In response to questions on whether the office expects to release more rulings this year, an HHS spokesperson told us the office can’t comment on open cases or anticipated findings. “ORI’s Division of Investigative Oversight continues to carry out its oversight responsibilities, and staff actively engage in process improvements to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of responding to research misconduct allegations,” the spokesperson said.
Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.
Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”
