canada – Retraction Watch

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.

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction

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.

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.”

Panel upholds results of contested U Toronto mammography study

The University of Toronto has quietly published the results of an inquiry into the Canadian National Breast Screening Study that began in 2022 and, it seems, concluded in March 2024.

The panel, tasked with evaluating new allegations about the trial’s randomization, found the evidence it reviewed did not affect the results of the trials, which called into question the value of mammography in women ages 40-59.

Imaging scientist Martin Yaffe of the University of Toronto has long been a critic of the CNBSS, a pair of randomized clinical trials of mammography conducted in the 1980s. In April, we published a guest post in which Yaffe detailed the history of the trial and his critiques of it, as well as new evidence that clinical staff may have unwittingly influenced randomization. He reported this to the Canadian Cancer Society in 2021, and to the university.

Journals investigating dozens of papers by leading Canadian urologists

A high-profile Canadian urologist received an editorial expression of concern for one of his papers this month, after anonymous comments on PubPeer flagged suspected data duplication in dozens of his articles.

By our count, sleuths have flagged 30 papers co-authored by Martin Gleave, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and co-founder of the Vancouver Prostate Centre. According to the posts on PubPeer, images in these studies appear “much more similar than expected” based on analyses using the similarity detection software ImageTwin. The issues include similarities within individual papers and across multiple publications, with some comments suggesting the alleged reuse of tumor specimens.

Gleave, an appointee to the Order of Canada for his work developing treatments for prostate cancer, has received more than $120 million (approximately $84 million USD) in funding throughout his career, according to his profile on the Vancouver Prostate Centre website. He is also a co-founder of OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, with several of the findings from the flagged papers connected to the company and related patents.

New engineering dean has two retractions for authorship manipulation

A newly appointed dean at the University of Guelph in Canada has had two papers retracted for “evidence of authorship manipulation.”

Another article by the researcher, Moncef Nehdi, formerly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, seems to match a paper that had its authorship advertised for sale, according to a post on PubPeer.

Nehdi told Retraction Watch he stands by his group’s work in the two retracted papers, but agreed with the retractions because he thought the investigations “raised some valid concerns.”

Nehdi began a five-year term as dean of the University of Guelph’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences on September 1, according to an announcement this spring. The announcement stated:

Spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt faked data in multiple papers, university finds

An investigation at McMaster University found that Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist by training who has had 15 papers retracted in the last three years, “engaged in fabrication and falsification” including duplicating data, according to summarized findings sent to coauthors.

Kate Laskowski, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, shared on Twitter the summary McMaster had sent her about three papers she had coauthored with Pruitt.

Should residents and fellows be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses?

The ‘publish or perish’ culture is no longer reserved for academic faculty and post-doctoral fellows. The paradigm has spilled over (or bled into) medical training, aided by the digital revolution. The widespread availability of online library catalogs and referencing software has enabled the mass production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

In short, medical research no longer requires original ideas, just access to the internet, which is perhaps why, as one 2018 editorial put it, there is “Replication, Duplication, and Waste in a Quarter Million Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses.”

With all of that in mind, the orthopaedic surgery residents at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, gathered virtually for their annual research day to debate whether they supported or rejected the status quo that residents be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses. At the start of the debate, following an opening Visiting Professor Presentation on trends in retractions by Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky, 58% of the residents opposed the status quo, while 42% supported it.

Medical journal retracts letter calling hijab ‘an instrument of oppression’

A major Canadian medical journal has retracted a letter to the editor by a prominent surgeon in Quebec who expressed reservations about a photo the journal had published of two young girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab.

The photo in question (above) ran on the cover of the November 8, 2021 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.The image prompted a letter from Sherif Emil, an endowed chair of surgery at Montreal Children’s Hospital of McGill University. Published December 20, the letter voiced concern that the photograph used “an instrument of oppression [the headcovering] as a symbol of diversity and inclusion.” (That’s in the title of the letter, which the journal now acknowledges writing, not Emil.)

As the CBC reported, Emil wrote that:

Behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt’s PhD dissertation withdrawn

Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn.

The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: