spain – Retraction Watch

Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books

A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.

Carla Rossi, scientific director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi in Verona, Italy, must repay the funding due to extensive plagiarism discovered in the texts, according to the decision by the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, released in January. Rossi also is barred from applying for grant funding from the foundation for five years, according to the ruling. Rossi is founder and director of Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats in Barcelona and also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (RECEPTIO) in Switzerland, which operates an academic press that has published Rossi’s works.

The Swiss body issued the funding ban in 2024 and ordered Rossi to repay grants for a total of three books after finding a pattern of plagiarism and lack of transparency during the grant application process, according to a summary in the court decision. Rossi took the foundation to court over the findings, arguing it reviewed incorrect versions of her books and suggesting other versions circulating on the Internet were altered or manipulated by third parties.

Spanish court rules researcher plagiarized colleague, orders withdrawal of works

Spain’s Supreme Court in Madrid
*Cberbell/Wikimedia Commons*

The Supreme Court of Spain has ordered a literary scholar to pursue retractions of nine works it determined were plagiarized.

The Tribunal Supremo upheld a lower court’s ruling that narrative theory researcher Franciscó Álamo Felices, a professor at the University of Almería in Spain, plagiarized a colleague’s work in two books and seven articles. José R. Valles Calatrava, a literary theory professor at the same university, sued Felices in 2019 for infringement of his intellectual property rights.

That lower court found Felices responsible for “a huge amount of plagiarism at different times and in different articles, revealing a systematic and conscientious parasitic attitude and a desire for appropriation,” according to a translation of the ruling by DeepL Translate. In an October 2025 decision, the Tribunal Supremo dismissed an appeal by Felices against the ruling, finding he failed to demonstrate any fundamental errors of law.

Soil scientist previously named in citation scandal appointed to editor role at Elsevier journal

A soil scientist who resigned from several journals in 2017 after being linked to manipulated citations has been appointed to the editorial board of a journal copublished by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media.

International Soil and Water Conservation Research announced in April that Artemi Cerdà would serve as an editorial board member, describing him as a “renowned researcher” in the field of soil erosion and land management. The appointment comes eight years after Cerdà, of the University of Valencia, in Spain, was found to have manipulated citations in favor of his own work and journals with which he was associated.

While Cerdà has not responded to our questions about his appointment, a spokesperson for Elsevier acknowledged Cerdà’s history but defended the decision, writing that researchers “grow into their roles through participation and learning.” The spokesperson continued:

Exclusive: Paper-mill articles buoyed Spanish dean’s research output

Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.

How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.

At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way.

Overturning a dubious retraction proves difficult for education professor

For the past eight years, an education researcher in Spain has been waging an unsuccessful battle – including legal action – to quash a retraction she argues should never have happened.

Her paper, about the use of digital tools in early childhood education, was pulled by Computers & Education just months after it was published in 2015. According to the retraction notice, the article was submitted for publication while it was still under review at another journal, violating editorial policies against duplicate submission.

But according to the researcher, Elena Ramírez Orellana of the University of Salamanca, her paper had already been rejected by the first journal before it was sent to the other. She had the documents to prove it, she said, but that didn’t matter.

Public health journal retracts paper on austerity for “inaccurate and misleading results”

The American Journal of Public Health has retracted a controversial 2018 paper on the effects of economic austerity in Spain because it contained “inaccurate and misleading” results linking those policies to a massive spike in premature deaths.

The journal also has published a second piece, by a different group of authors, refuting the central claim of the now-retracted paper. Whereas the first article asserted that austerity in Spain during the mid-2000s led to more than 500,000 excess deaths, the new research says deaths in the country slowed during the country’s economic crisis.

The flawed article, “Austerity policies and mortality in Spain after the financial crisis of 2008,” was written by a group of researchers at the Hospital Universitario Nuestra Señora de Candelaria, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, on the Canary Islands. The authors claimed that their analysis of the years 2011 to 2015 showed that:

Biochemist in Spain retracts eight papers at once

A high-profile researcher at the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain has retracted eight papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry for figure issues.

All of the papers were co-authored by Carlos López-Otín, who studies a group of enzymes that break down proteins, cancer genomics and aging, and whose lab web site boasts that

His works have been collected in more than 400 articles in international journals and have been cited to date more than 44.000 times, with an aggregate Hirsch index of h=100.

A representative notice: Continue reading Biochemist in Spain retracts eight papers at once

After probe, journal removes flag from four papers, corrects manipulated images

Last year, Journal of Cell Science added notices to four papers after a reader contacted the editors with some concerns about issues with the figures. Now, it’s replacing the previous editorial notices with corrections, which address duplicated images and data.

When the journal issued expressions of concern for four papers co-authored by José Ignacio Rodriguez-Crespo about the allegations (which had also been raised on PubPeer), it notified his institution, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). The newly issued correction notices explain that UCM investigated the four papers, and the data support the results and conclusions. In two cases, the authors supplied the original data, and in the others, they replicated the experiments.

Rodriguez-Crespo declined to comment, saying only that the journal

Continue reading After probe, journal removes flag from four papers, corrects manipulated images

Dental journal pulls a dozen papers for recycled images and “unreliable data”

A leading orthodontics journal has retracted 12 papers after determining that they contained either reused images, questionable data or both. Several of the articles involved experiments conducted in dogs — and one person familiar with the case told us that the duplication was an attempt to avoid sacrificing more animals than necessary for the research.

Although the list of authors on the articles varies, the common denominator is Jose Luis Calvo-Guirado, of the UCAM Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, in Spain. Calvo-Guirado’s title at the institution is director de la Cátedra Internacional de Investigación en Odontología, which Google translates as director of the International Research Chair in Dentistry. Calvo-Guirado also holds (or has held) a research professorship at SUNY Stony Brook in the Department of Prosthodontics and Digital Medicine, according to his CV.

Calvo-Guirado’s name is on at least 187 entries in PubMed. Of those, 40 appeared in Clinical Oral Implants Research, a Wiley title on whose editorial board the researcher served, according to his CV.

Continue reading Dental journal pulls a dozen papers for recycled images and “unreliable data”

Whoops: Authors didn’t mean to include new data in article about transgender identity

Here’s something we don’t see that often — authors retracting one of their articles because it included new data.

But that is the case with a 2017 review exploring the potential genetic and hormonal underpinnings of gender identity. The authors Rosa Fernández García and Eduardo Pásaro Mendez told Retraction Watch that they asked bioethics journal Cuadernos de Bioética to withdraw their review after realizing it “indirectly” mentioned some of their unpublished work. According to García, the authors had hoped to publish the new data in a scientific paper before the review came out, but the review ended up being published first.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Is Sexual Identity Optional? A Study of The Genetics of Transsexuality:”

Continue reading Whoops: Authors didn’t mean to include new data in article about transgender identity

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