by journal – Retraction Watch

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.

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday

In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.

But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.

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.”

Journal retracts breast cancer paper 10 years after sleuth flagged issues

A biomedical journal has retracted a paper by a cancer researcher who sued her former institution over misconduct allegations. The action comes a decade after a sleuth first raised concerns about the article.

Former Ohio State researcher Flavia Pichiorri criticized how the publication, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, handled the dispute and said the journal suddenly pivoted away from its plan to republish the study with repeated experiments, a claim supported by correspondence seen by Retraction Watch.

In 2020, Ohio State University found Pichiorri, who worked in the lab of Carlo Croce, culpable for manipulating and reusing images in four publications, spanning from her time in Croce’s lab through establishing her own lab at Ohio State. Croce was cleared of direct misconduct, but OSU found serious management and oversight failures in his laboratory. Once a high-profile cancer researcher at Ohio State, Croce now has 18 retractions. He has filed several defamation lawsuits unsuccessfully, and reportedly owes his attorneys more than $1 million.

Harvard cancer researchers earn retraction for image duplication

A group of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have lost a paper for image duplication following an investigation by the two institutions.

The paper, published in September 2019 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, described a treatment for tumors caused by a disorder called tuberous sclerosis complex. Several of the article’s 12 authors are affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine division. Corresponding author David Kwiatkowski is an oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

The research was partially funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and a National Institutes of Health grant, the latter of which was awarded to Kwiatkowski.

Sage retracts eight papers by former Radboud ‘rising star’ for compromised peer-review process

The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited.

Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep. The retraction applies to eight of the 25 papers Griep coauthored in the journal, according to the July 14 retraction notice. The papers were retracted for a “compromised” peer-review process, the notice states.

“As the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles, the objectivity of the peer-review process has been compromised,” reads a publisher’s note published alongside the retractions. The move “relates to the underlying review process and no determination has been made regarding the scientific content of the articles.”

ORI sanction and news coverage prompts sleuthing, retraction

Four months after the Office of Research Integrity sanctioned a former postdoc for falsifying images in grant reports, a Science journal is retracting a paper by the researcher for image duplication.

After reading our story about the ORI’s findings, sleuth Paul S. Brookes took a look at the researcher’s ORCID profile and ran his papers through an AI tool that spots duplicate images.

Brookes’ analysis showed a 2019 paper in Science Signaling contained an image identical to an earlier study in Scientific Reports with the same first author — Chen-Yeh Ke, the former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York who was sanctioned by ORI in March for falsifying images in an unpublished manuscript supported by federal funds and reporting the fabricated results in two research performance progress reports.

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.

Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation

The Journal of Medical Ethics has retracted a paper on the use of AI in the pharmaceutical industry for containing references that don’t exist. The article’s sole author: a high school student.

The paper, which argues biased algorithms can exacerbate inequities in health care, was published in September. The author, Irfan Biswas, listed his affiliation as Shrewsbury Public Schools in Massachusetts.

According to the May 28 retraction notice, an investigation by the journal found Biswas used generative AI to “identify and understand referenced sources” and did not verify the references prior to submission.

Major citation index put surgery journals on hold following Retraction Watch investigation

Clarivate’s influential Web of Science database of abstracts and citations has paused coverage of new content from a collection of surgery journals, including a top-ranked title in the field, following a Retraction Watch investigation from March.

Indexation in the database is widely seen as a key scholarly imprimatur and ensures visibility in literature searches and citation counts. If a journal is removed from Clarivate’s Master Journal List following review, it loses its impact factor and manuscript submissions may plummet.

The move came just a week after our investigation, published March 12, which found mandatory citation of reporting guidelines in the International Journal of Surgery (IJS) had inflated the impact factor of the open-access title, making it more attractive to authors and readers. The hold does not appear to be mentioned on the journal websites and we were not aware of it until now.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: