Retraction Watch Staff

Weekend reads: An alternative to the impact factor in China; the clinical trials of six ‘superretractors’; Retraction Watch goes to Capitol Hill

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Scientist who alleged COVID cover-up circulated a faked NIH email, agency says
BMJ retracts most of a special issue for ‘compromised’ peer review and ‘improbable device use’
‘Game-changer’ breast cancer study retracted as Indiana researcher out of his post
Retraction Watch testifies in Congressional hearing on scientific publishing. Coverage of the hearing in Nature and Inside Higher Ed.
45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Retraction Watch testifies in Congressional hearing on scientific publishing

Retraction Watch managing editor Kate Travis (center) testified April 15 in a hearing before the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Other witnesses were Carl Maxwell (left) of the Association of American Publishers and Jason Owen-Smith (right) of the University of Michigan.

A hearing on Capitol Hill today explored issues in scientific publishing — and Retraction Watch had a seat at the table.

The Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology called the hearing to talk about open access, reproducibility, predatory journals, paper mills and the incentive structure in science. The wide remit meant the committee and witnesses touched on quite a few topics in 90 minutes.

Our testimony, delivered by managing editor Kate Travis, focused on the pitfalls of “publish or perish” and how an overreliance on metrics has incentivized shortcuts in research and publishing. “‘Publish or perish’ is what has allowed businesses like paper mills and predatory journals to flourish, and more recently is leading to an explosion of AI-generated papers flooding journals,” Travis told the subcommittee.

Weekend reads: LLMs ‘are not the problem’; Cash for peer review ‘doesn’t work,’ project finds; ‘Many Flaws, Few Retractions’ in vaping literature

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data
Publisher changes citation, registration policies following Retraction Watch investigation
A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’
Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders? Scientists “are divided over whether this centralized, confidential list would solve the problem or generate new ones,” Nature reports.
Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

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Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

*Public comment is invited through April 17, 2026.*

A Canadian panel is proposing several changes to its guidelines for responsible conduct of research, including a provision that effectively removes any statute of limitations on investigations into potential misconduct.

The proposed revisions, from the Canadian Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research (PRCR), are up for public comment until April 17 and have not been made official. The PRCR is an interdisciplinary review and advisory body to Canada’s three federal research funding agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?

*Mark Barnes (courtesy of Ropes and Gray LLC)*

In an editorial published today in Science, Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes call for greater transparency in investigations of scientific misconduct with an aim toward making sure prospective academic employers know of applicants’ past misdeeds. As we’ve reported, in the absence of transparency around findings of misconduct, some universities have discovered too late they hired someone who has turned out to be a serial offender.

Lauer, who served as Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health from 2015-2025, and Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions, propose a tracking system similar to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). That database logs adverse actions and malpractice payments as a way to inform decisions about individual physicians by hospitals. As Lauer and Barnes note, federal law “requires a hospital to query the NPDB whenever it is considering a new applicant for medical privileges, as well as to conduct repeat queries every 2 years to make sure information on staff is up to date.” We asked Barnes to elaborate on the ideas presented in the op-ed. (He notes he is speaking only for himself here.)

Retraction Watch: You write in your op-ed universities may avoid sharing personal information — presumably including results of misconduct investigations — for fear of legal claims of defamation or violations of privacy. Are those fears valid?

Weekend reads: Half of social science ‘doesn’t replicate’; ‘Scientific ghosts: Life after retraction’; multisensory learning paper retracted

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?
Jury to decide whether Duke retaliated against researcher who reported sexual harassment
BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’
Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage
Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’
Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

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Weekend reads: ‘Illicit AI use’ in hundreds of peer reviews; 49-year-old commentary on talc retracted; co-authorship as a ‘traded commodity’

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Physicists flag over 50 papers on superheavy elements, leading to 3 retractions
Guest post: A call to end the ‘impact on conclusions’ test for retraction
Publisher to retract entire conference proceedings, ban editor who wrote most of them
The Lancet retracts half-century-old commentary on talc for undisclosed industry ties
Judge upholds 15-year debarment against scientist who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch
Why don’t journalists circle back to cover retractions? A conversation with Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: How to buy a scientific paper; creating responsible authorship culture; sanction authors for hallucinated references?

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

University of Melbourne opens formal investigation into education researcher John Hattie
Most editors at math journal resign over multiple reviews, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ removal of EIC
Technology journal pulls papers for unauthorized author changes, fictitious emails

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: ‘Don’t hate the replicator, hate the game’; Crossref finds 150K incorrect citation links in database; Announcing our Ctrl-Z award

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Stolen economics study retracted following Retraction Watch coverage
Former Mount Sinai postdoc falsified images in grant updates, ORI says
Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire
Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board

Plus:

Announcing our $2,500 award for researchers who discover errors in their work and take steps to correct the scientific record

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to nearly 650, and our mass resignations list has 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: The LLMs ‘willing to commit academic fraud’; ‘peer replication’ instead of review; a ‘spam filter’ for predatory journals

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines
A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction
Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions
Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper
Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to nearly 650, and our mass resignations list has 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

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