Rita Aksenfeld

New COPE retraction guidelines address paper mills, third parties, and more

New retraction guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics include more specific details about when to retract a paper, many of which address paper mill activity. For instance, journals should retract articles when “authorship of the publication cannot be verified or there are serious concerns about accountability for the research,” according to the updated guidance, released today.

COPE also recommends retracting papers with “any form of misrepresentation,” including “deception; fraud (eg, a paper mill); identity theft or fictitious authorship; or undisclosed involvement of artificial intelligence (AI).”

The organization has also released a new, separate guidance for expressions of concern. Both documents reiterate the as-soon-as-possible timeframe for notices and give more specific details on what information should be included in each type of notice.

PLOS One slaps four papers with expressions of concern for overlapping control data

Four papers from a team of researchers in Japan have received expressions of concern for overlap in control samples, data, study design and statistical analyses. The publisher of the articles says it has closed its investigation.

The notices were published in PLOS One from July 31 to August 3 to inform readers of “study design concerns” and to provide additional supplementary data. They also cite a pair of related papers in other journals for the same problems, but those articles remain unmarked.

Masaya Oki, a professor of applied chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Fukui in Japan, is the corresponding author on all six papers. Each discusses the effects of a different gene inhibitor on cataracts taken from rat eyes. While the authors used multiple methods to study these effects, the EOCs concern the results obtained using microarrays to compare lens samples.

Authors asked Elsevier to retract papers in 2012. In one case, they’re still waiting.

Elsevier has retracted two papers for image duplication – 13 years after the authors alerted the journal to issues with the work.

The papers are the third and fourth retractions for a group of researchers in Ireland. The team had asked Elsevier journals to retract five papers in April 2012 — one of which is still in process.

The first two papers, published in Cancer Letters, were retracted in 2013.

Then last week, two more articles, published in the European Journal of Pharmacology (EJP), were retracted.

Sage journal retracts nearly 50 papers for signs of paper mill activity

Sage has retracted four dozen papers from one of its journals for suspected paper mill activity.

The publisher started an investigation into the European Journal of Inflammation “after we noticed signs of papermill activity in one of the articles,” Laura West, a corporate communications and public affairs manager at Sage, told Retraction Watch.

The investigation found the papers “contain indicators of third-party involvement,” according to the retraction notice, published August 5. Sage and the editor of the journal decided to retract the articles due to “concerns around author contributions to these articles, as well as concerns around the integrity of the research process.”

‘Biologically implausible distributions’ and self-plagiarism result in 10 retractions for ob-gyn

An obstetrician and gynecologist from an Egyptian university has garnered more than a half-dozen retractions so far this year for self plagiarism and problematic data.

Ibrahim A Abdelazim is on the faculty of Ain Shams University, Cairo, but is on “unpaid leave” and currently working at Ahmadi Hospital in Kuwait, he told us. The recent retractions bring his total to 10, along with one expression of concern. Several journals are conducting investigations into his other papers.

Published from 2012 to 2016, the retracted papers range from methods papers describing how to detect premature rupture of fetal membranes and how to sample endometrial tissue to a descriptive study of fertility after environmental crisis.

Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says

The observed and forecasted growth rate of paper mill papers outpaces corrective measures, a new study finds. *R. Richardson et al./PNAS 2025*

Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating, according to a study of problematic publishing practices and the networks that fuel them.

The study, published August 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined research fraud carried out by paper mills, brokers and predatory publishers. By producing low quality or fabricated research, selling authorship and publishing without adequate quality control and peer review, respectively, these three groups were well known to produce a large volume of fraudulent research.

“This is a great paper showing how much fraud there is in the scientific literature. The paper also looks at different methods on how to detect problematic papers, networks and editors,” Anna Abalkina, a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, said.

Springer Nature retracts book with fake citations. Help us find more cases like this.

Springer Nature has officially retracted a book on machine learning following coverage by Retraction Watch. A reader sent us a tip about this book; we’d love your help identifying more.

As we reported, the book, Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced, contained many citations to nonexistent works. These fake references are a hallmark of text generated by large language models like ChatGPT.

The retraction notice mentions the illusory citations, stating, “Following publication concerns were raised regarding the validity of certain references. Upon further investigation, the Publisher was unable to verify the source of 25 out of 46 references in this book.” After listing the 25 citations, 12 of which we found in our initial reporting, it continues, “the Series Editor and the publisher therefore no longer have confidence in the reliability of this book. The author has not stated explicitly whether he agrees with this retraction.”

Noticed: Sleuths are starting to get credit for retractions

Pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis has flagged thousands of papers over the years, so they rarely see something new. But an email from Frontiers about an upcoming retraction on a paper Francis originally flagged offered just that: The option to be acknowledged in the retraction notice.

After years of publishers not routinely – or even often – naming sleuths despite many asking for their often unpaid and risky work to be acknowledged, the trend of acknowledging who identified issues in papers may be gaining momentum. Frontiers is one of several publishers developing such policies, and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) plans to release new guidelines in August that would recommend this practice.

Frontiers began offering acknowledgements last year, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch. “Once investigations are complete, the third party is informed of the outcome and, if a retraction is to be published, offered the option to be recognized in the notice with a standardized statement,” they said.

27-year-old Nature paper earns expression of concern

Figure 1a in a 1998 paper was first flagged on PubPeer in 2016 for image irregularities.

Nature has issued an editorial expression of concern on a paper published 27 years ago — and nearly nine years after learning of an “irregularity” in a figure.

According to the June 18 statement, a figure in the 1998 paper showed duplicated control lanes, with one of them flipped.

Pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis flagged the issue on PubPeer in 2016, and reported the problem to the journal at the same time, Francis told Retraction Watch.

Director of Cambridge toxicology institute retracts paper for potential image manipulation

Twelve years after sleuths flagged problematic images in a 2009 paper, the authors — including the head of a UK research institute — have retracted the article.

The paper, published in Genes & Development, has been cited 126 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the June 1 retraction notice, the authors retracted the paper because of “anomalies in the data presented” in multiple figures. “The issues relate to potential instances of image manipulation, including undisclosed splicing, lane flipping, and lane and panel duplications in the preparation of these figures.”

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