Lori Youmshajekian

Misconduct cases remain unresolved for years in South Korea, data show

*The National Research Foundation of Korea in Daejeon.*

Misconduct inquiries in South Korea meant to be completed within months are taking years instead, according to data from the country’s primary agency for academic research.

Of the 83 misconduct cases the National Research Foundation has overseen since 2021, 49, including some still open, failed to reach a decision within the six-month deadline set by the Ministry of Education. Twenty two cases were open for longer than a year, and some had not progressed beyond the preliminary stages.

The foundation also wasn’t able to ascertain basic information for many cases. In more than half of all the cases, the agency couldn’t confirm when the preliminary inquiry began or ended. The politician who obtained the figures says the deadline has become meaningless and is calling for better oversight.

Springer Nature journal could lose registry standing for clearing author of duplication

A Springer Nature journal’s failure to find duplication in two papers by the same author could cost its official recognition as a scholarly publication in Norway.

The national register in Norway that decides which journals count toward academics’ publication records has concluded there is “no doubt” of duplication between two papers, which appear to use the same student survey. The ruling comes more than a year after Springer Nature, publisher of one of the journals, Innovative Higher Education, investigated the same issue and cleared the author.

Both papers were written by Artur Strzelecki of the University of Economics in Katowice, Poland, who denies there was any wrongdoing. Springer Nature told Retraction Watch it would consider the assessment from Norway, which it said was not available when the journal’s editors investigated.

Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity

In March, Thomas Harvey sat in on a talk at the American Physical Society’s summit in Denver on a new model of the universe that claimed to eliminate the need for dark matter and dark energy. William George, a fluid dynamicist who spent his career studying turbulence and an emeritus professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, gave the presentation.

“It was very rambling,” said Harvey, a postdoc working in high energy theory at MIT, “and it was very clearly wrong.”

After the talk, Harvey found George’s paper on the topic in Physics of Fluids. He decided to flag the problems he saw on PubPeer under a pseudonym, including errors in the math and misapplied principles of general relativity, and then sent a “polite email” to the editors.

“That’s where it went very wrong,” Harvey said.

When open data are misused

*Credit: HALUSTD from Popspixel via Canva*

When Dorothy Bishop was asked to review a paper for a small neuroscience journal in August, she could tell from the abstract the authors had used a dataset she had first published four years ago on the public repository OpenNeuro. The dataset contained raw functional MRI scans from 50 participants, taken while they completed language-related tasks such as thinking of words and matching words to pictures.

“I was curious that somebody had already analyzed it, because it’s a hefty dataset that would have taken a lot of work to analyze,” Bishop, an emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, told Retraction Watch.

She quickly found problems in the manuscript. The description of the dataset didn’t match what she and her colleagues had actually done, and several references didn’t support the claims they were cited for. “There was clearly something seriously wrong,” she said. The editor was also suspicious, Bishop said, and the paper was eventually rejected. But Bishop believed the authors would try to publish the manuscript elsewhere, so she did a broader search of their names.

Researchers appeal misconduct finding over studies of trans youth

Five researchers at Norway’s national gender incongruence clinic are appealing a university committee’s finding they committed “gross negligence” and scientific misconduct after the group published several studies using the medical records of more than 1,000 minors without patient consent.

Two of the articles set out to count how many minors were referred to the clinic, characterize the mental health burden of trans patients and document their treatment trajectories and detransition rates. In June, a joint committee of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital (OUS) ruled five of the coauthors committed scientific misconduct for using the patients’ medical records without ethics approval or patient consent. The researchers maintain the work was for quality assurance, which in Norway doesn’t require consent. The committee ruled the work was research.

Two other articles violated research ethics standards in a “reprehensible” way, the committee found, but did not constitute misconduct. Those papers describe the outcomes of chest wall contouring and genital surgery.

Elsevier to ‘soon investigate’ two Macchiarini papers more than a year after retraction request

Elsevier says it will begin investigating two papers coauthored by disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini “soon,” more than a year after two critics of his work formally requested the publisher retract the articles — and nearly a decade after two institutions found him guilty of misconduct for related work.

The papers, published in Biomaterials in 2009 and 2010, include descriptions of a 2008 trachea transplant in Barcelona conducted by Macchiarini — described in The Lancet that year, as well as in a five-year follow-up published in 2013. Both Lancet papers reported a successful surgery and that the patient had a “normal social and working life.” In reality, she needed stents, her lung function did not improve and she eventually had a lung removed.

The Barcelona patient survived, but at least three others who underwent Macchiarini’s synthetic trachea transplants eventually died. In 2023, a Swedish court sentenced Macchiarini to 2.5 years in prison for gross assault related to his failed transplants. So far he has accumulated 13 retractions.

A New Zealand journal deleted a paper for potential harm to Māori months after publishing it

When Arna Mitchell submitted her article critiquing a proposal for different standards of practice for Māori and non-Māori clients in clinical psychology, she thought it would be too controversial to publish because it challenged views becoming influential among professional and academic circles.

But the Journal of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists (JNZCCP) had the paper peer-reviewed and published it in August 2025. And then, 10 months later, they deleted the article, after deciding the work could perpetuate harm to Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, and that it conflicted with the college’s values.

The college defended the deletion by arguing the journal is not an independent, indexed academic journal. But the decision has caused members to quit the college and has drawn criticism from the field, including from a former editor of the journal.

Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement

Images from the now-deleted dataset on Kaggle purportedly showed people who had a stroke, but the folder included stock images and photos of politicians and celebrities, as seen in this screenshot.

The online data repository Kaggle has removed a problematic dataset for violating intellectual property rights months after it was flagged by sleuths for containing celebrity photos and lacking information on data provenance or confirmed medical diagnoses.

Researchers had used the images to train machine learning algorithms to detect stroke, but the dataset instead contained images of people with Bell’s palsy — as well as pictures of celebrities from movies and on the red carpet, as we reported in May. Adrian Barnett, a medical statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, flagged the dataset after discovering two others he and his colleagues investigated in a February preprint that showed signs of being fabricated.

Using a reverse image search, Barnett matched four of the photos in the dataset, called “Facial droop and facial paralysis image,” to a paper published years earlier in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA). Only after prompting the journal to complain to Kaggle did the company take down the dataset.

Journal investigating apparent data mismatch in climate study

A leading environmental economics journal is looking into claims that a 2025 study linking national innovation to lower carbon emissions contains data that does not match its source, after an expert in the field requested the paper be retracted.

The article appeared in Ecological Economics, the journal for the International Society for Ecological Economics and published by Elsevier. The authors, three researchers at ESSCA School of Management in Lyon, claimed to draw on data from 229 countries between 2013 and 2020 and reported a negative relationship between a country’s “innovativeness” and its carbon dioxide emissions per capita. The paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But three months after it was published, in October 2025, the journal began investigating anomalies in the dataset, although the authors maintain none of it was fabricated. In a letter to the journal’s editors requesting a retraction last October, seen by Retraction Watch, an academic with expertise in the field who reviewed the dataset said the paper had “serious data integrity concerns” and described a “clear case of research misconduct.”

A student claimed to have a Ph.D. in at least eight letters to journals. Two have been retracted.

This past year, Zhihao Lei has signed his name to at least 35 letters to the editor of medical journals, weighing in on topics from ICU care to breast cancer. In eight of them, he identified himself as a Ph.D. at Cornell University, although he held only a bachelor’s degree at the time.

Two of those letters, one in JAMA Oncology and another in JAMA Pediatrics, were retracted last month after Lei himself acknowledged in the notices he had “falsely reported” his degree as a Ph.D. and implying he was an employee at the university when he was not. When he published the letters, he held a bachelor’s degree and was enrolled at Cornell as a master’s student in the School of Professional Studies. The retractions relate to Lei’s false credentials and not the content of the letters. In at least six others Lei published in the past year, he also signs off as a Ph.D., although none of these has been corrected or retracted.

Lei, who has served as a peer reviewer at Cancer Gene Therapy and the British Medical Journal, said he didn’t understand why Retraction Watch was interested in this case. “I am not entirely clear about the purpose of your inquiry,” he wrote in an email, adding that the retractions involved only author metadata and credentials, not fabrications, falsification or plagiarism.

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