Kate Travis

Lancet flags long-scrutinized report of infant poisoned by opioids in breast milk

The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto

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.”

Medical journal publishes a letter on AI with a fake reference to itself

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.

ORI has released just two misconduct findings this year

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.

The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

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.

The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian public educational institutions.”

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.”

Research integrity conference hit with AI-generated abstracts

The first of three themes for next year’s World Conference on Research Integrity will be the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for research integrity. In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.

The call for abstracts for the conference, set for May in Vancouver, closed a month ago. Last week, peer reviewers received an email with “URGENT” in the subject line.

“If you haven’t already reviewed the 9th WCRI abstracts that have been allocated to you, please take note of the following,” the email read. “We’ve received several signals that an unusually large proportion of the abstracts are completely off-topic and might have been written by some form of generative AI.”

Math is back as Clarivate boosts integrity markers in Highly Cited Researchers list

This year’s Highly Cited Researchers are from 61 countries and regions, but 86 percent of them work in the top 10.

The analysis behind this year’s Highly Cited Researchers list, released today by indexing giant Clarivate, includes several tweaks aimed at reducing attempts to game the metric and excluding researchers who engage in questionable publication practices.

Those changes include removing highly cited papers from the calculations authored by researchers excluded from last year’s list for integrity issues. The company also applied specific removal criteria — including excessive self-citation rates, papers retracted for integrity concerns, and prolific publication rates — more comprehensively this year. In past years, the company had done so manually for particular geographic areas or disciplines.

“We’re trying to make sure that the indicators are valid and reliable, which means we have to include these kinds of filters or screens and quantitative tests that indicate some kind of quality, qualitative character,” David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, told Retraction Watch.

Less is more: Academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes

Academic publishing needs “renewed focus and collective action” to embrace new approaches and ensure the future of the industry, concludes a report from Cambridge University Press, released last week.

What started as an exploration of barriers to open access models turned into a call for “radical change” in academic publishing. “It has been clear for some time that the publishing ecosystem is under increasing strain,” Mandy Hill, managing director of Cambridge University Press, wrote in the introduction to the report. “This was the case before the growth of open access, but it is also clear that the shift to open has not solved the problems, as some early open access advocates may have hoped.”

The report, which followed workshops and interviews with stakeholders, includes results of a survey of more than 3,000 researchers, librarians, funders, publishers and societies.

$1.5 million program targets changes to academic incentives

The incentive systems that drive academic research underlie nearly every story we write: publication counts for promotion, pressure to produce positive results, hitting certain metrics, and so on. Critics have long called for change in these systems, but support for such change is hard to come by.

Several organizations are now putting more than $1 million toward reimagining hiring, promotion and tenure at U.S. universities. The program, called the Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, is seeking proposals for “bold, creative strategies to develop academic reward systems that foster a collaborative, responsive, and transparent research environment.”

Organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), the program will offer grants at two funding levels — $50,000 or $250,000 — over two years. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dana Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have provided the funding, which totals $1.5 million.

Taylor & Francis threatens legal action against anonymous group’s ‘highly defamatory’ claims

Taylor & Francis has threatened legal action against an online group that has made allegations, based largely on vague insinuations rather than evidence, about the publisher and a member of its research integrity team.

The group, ScienceGuardians, is an anonymous organization whose website serves as what they call an online “journal club.” On X, it has been posting so-called “investigations” of several sleuths, publishers and organizations, what it calls “perpetrators of the PubPeer Network Mob.” Its targets have included sleuths Kevin Patrick and Reese Richardson, and others such as Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp, and its posts are often amplified by those whose work has been questioned on PubPeer or retracted.

On September 7, the group published a string of claims on X about Nick Wise, a sleuth who joined Taylor & Francis in January as a research integrity manager. The ScienceGuardians post characterized the move as Wise “infiltrated” the publisher’s research integrity office. The post states he is responsible for 1,300 posts on PubPeer (which we have noted he does under his real name), and, ScienceGuardians claims, more than 100 others under the name “Simnia avena.”

Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature

Starting around 2023, a curious trend took hold in papers on drug safety monitoring. The number of articles published on an individual drug and its link to specific adverse events went from a steady increase to a huge spike.

The data source in most of those articles was largely the same: The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System, or FAERS. In 2021, around 100 studies mining FAERS for drug safety signals were published. In 2024, that number was 600, with more than that already published this year.

Two journals in particular published the bulk of these papers, Frontiers in Pharmacology and Expert Opinion on Drug Safety. In response to the flood, Frontiers started to require independent validation of studies drawing on public datasets. And Expert Opinion on Drug Safety decided in late July to stop accepting submissions altogether that use the FAERS database for this particular type of study.

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