by journal – Retraction Watch

PeerJ retracts study that secretly observed tourists’ reactions to snakes

For a study published in PeerJ, a researcher placed plastic snakes (left panel) and viper carcasses on hiking paths (right) to gauge people’s reactions. The journal retracted the paper in August for ethics approval concerns.
*A.V. Dyugmedzhiev/PeerJ 2026*

The journal PeerJ has retracted a study that attempted to capture tourists’ “authentic responses” to venomous snakes by putting plastic models and dead vipers around popular hiking destinations and secretly watching how people reacted to the encounters.

Study author Angel Valentinov Dyugmedzhiev of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences assessed their reactions from a few meters away and never interacted with any of the participants so as to avoid “direct interference in the experimental setup,” he wrote in the paper, published June 23.

When tourists discussed the snakes among themselves, he recorded whether they correctly identified the species and whether they realized the viper was either dead or a model. The study found most tourists didn’t spot the vipers, and only a small number of them showed strong fear toward them.

Researchers appeal misconduct finding over studies of trans youth

Five researchers at Norway’s national gender incongruence clinic are appealing a university committee’s finding they committed “gross negligence” and scientific misconduct after the group published several studies using the medical records of more than 1,000 minors without patient consent.

Two of the articles set out to count how many minors were referred to the clinic, characterize the mental health burden of trans patients and document their treatment trajectories and detransition rates. In June, a joint committee of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital (OUS) ruled five of the coauthors committed scientific misconduct for using the patients’ medical records without ethics approval or patient consent. The researchers maintain the work was for quality assurance, which in Norway doesn’t require consent. The committee ruled the work was research.

Two other articles violated research ethics standards in a “reprehensible” way, the committee found, but did not constitute misconduct. Those papers describe the outcomes of chest wall contouring and genital surgery.

Procrastination study by Duke’s Dan Ariely retracted after sleuths find signs of data tampering

A psychology journal has retracted a seminal 2002 paper on deadlines and procrastination coauthored by behavioral scientist Dan Ariely of Duke University just days after a team of sleuths published analyses of the original study data, finding it had been tampered with.

The posts, which appeared Aug. 31 and Sept. 2 on the Data Colada blog, dug into the datasets behind the two main experiments in Ariely’s paper, published 24 years ago in Psychological Science. The reanalysis was prompted by a study published July 15 in the same journal attempting to replicate one of the paper’s original experiments.

The Sept. 2 retraction notice cited all three works, noting the replication study “raised questions about the underlying data in the original study,” and the Data Colada posts “called into question the veracity of the overall findings.” Ariely’s coauthor on the paper, Klaus Wertenbroch, of INSEAD in France, requested the retraction on July 23, Psychological Science editor-in-chief Simine Vazire told Retraction Watch.

Journal retracts paper claiming network of corridors inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu.
*Douwe C. van der Zee/Wikimedia Commons*

A journal has retracted a paper by two Italian scientists who claimed to have found hidden structures inside of the oldest and largest of the Pyramids of Giza.

The study, published in Remote Sensing in October 2022, purportedly used synthetic aperture radar to penetrate the Pyramid of Khufu with energy pulses and process the echoes received, revealing a network of rooms, corridors and tunnels. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, as well as in a 2021 report by Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The journal retracted the study on Aug. 10 after a reader “brought concerns to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding methodological issues with this article.” The editors investigated the claims and “confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article.”

Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication

The Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University in Japan is defending Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka against claims of image manipulation in multiple studies on which he was an author. The institute says questioning Yamanaka’s integrity without sufficient evidence is “completely unacceptable.”

Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 and works at CiRA.

On August 7, Gotham City Research LLC, a short-selling firm based in the United States, released a report alleging image manipulation in several papers by Yamanaka appearing between 2000 and 2020.

Elsevier to ‘soon investigate’ two Macchiarini papers more than a year after retraction request

Elsevier says it will begin investigating two papers coauthored by disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini “soon,” more than a year after two critics of his work formally requested the publisher retract the articles — and nearly a decade after two institutions found him guilty of misconduct for related work.

The papers, published in Biomaterials in 2009 and 2010, include descriptions of a 2008 trachea transplant in Barcelona conducted by Macchiarini — described in The Lancet that year, as well as in a five-year follow-up published in 2013. Both Lancet papers reported a successful surgery and that the patient had a “normal social and working life.” In reality, she needed stents, her lung function did not improve and she eventually had a lung removed.

The Barcelona patient survived, but at least three others who underwent Macchiarini’s synthetic trachea transplants eventually died. In 2023, a Swedish court sentenced Macchiarini to 2.5 years in prison for gross assault related to his failed transplants. So far he has accumulated 13 retractions.

JAMA journal won’t retract oxycodone paper despite author request, citing no ‘falsification’

JAMA Internal Medicine has rejected a petition by a group of clinicians calling for the journal to retract an article on oxycodone therapy for osteoarthritis. The request — which initially included two of the paper’s original authors — stems from 19-year-old court records revealing the sponsor of the study withheld evidence about opioid withdrawal that contradicted the paper’s conclusions.

Published in 2000 under the journal’s previous name, Archives of Internal Medicine, the study of 133 patients concluded that around-the-clock, controlled-release oxycodone was safe and effective for managing osteoarthritis pain and that withdrawal symptoms were rare. In 2007, documents made public during a federal criminal case against Purdue Frederick Company, the maker of OxyContin, showed the company concealed how many patients became dependent on the drug during the trial and omitted withdrawal data. Purdue pleaded guilty in 2007 to fraudulently marketing OxyContin with the intent to mislead, agreeing to pay the government more than $600 million in penalties.

Despite the withdrawal data being made public nearly 20 years ago, the study has remained in the scientific literature without changes, Andrew Kolodny told Retraction Watch. Kolodny is medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University and president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. Kolodny has also testified before Congress about the opioid epidemic, assisted federal authorities with investigating the opioid industry and pain organizations, and acted as an expert witness for plaintiffs in litigation against opioid makers.

Biology journal pulls 100+ articles and counting from special issues for peer review manipulation

Elsevier’s International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has issued more than 100 retractions and counting for manipulated peer review in guest-edited special issues. The publisher has said one more retraction is coming.

Since June the publisher has retracted 120 papers. According to the retraction notices, the journal identified “[s]ystematic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process.”

A spokesperson for Elsevier told Retraction Watch the publisher “became aware of possible systematic manipulation and other issues such as plagiarism, image duplication, and authorship issues in a number of articles published in Special Issues” in 2025, which led them to conduct a wider investigation into more recent special issues.

BMJ Group retracts paper on COVID-19 vaccines and mortality featured in Senate hearing

BMJ Public Health has retracted a paper some — including a witness at a recent U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing — have used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths. The action comes more than two years after a researcher cited in the work flagged issues with the study.

Published May 6, 2024, the paper used the “Our World in Data” database and the World Mortality Dataset to look at COVID-19 related deaths during the height of the pandemic. News outlets covered it, from The Telegraph — “vaccines may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” — to the New York Post, which quoted the paper’s statements about reported “serious injuries and deaths following vaccination,” a move it later corrected.

An expression of concern, placed on the paper about a month after it was published, attempted to quell these claims, noting the study “does not establish any such link.” The notice also announced an institutional investigation by the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands, where three of the four authors worked, including corresponding author Saskia Mostert.

High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems

In July 2021, John Loadsman received a manuscript about a clinical trial that immediately roused his suspicion. Then the editor-in-chief of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Loadsman asked the authors for the raw data.

They weren’t pretty. “When I looked carefully at the spreadsheet, I could see entire blocks of data that were repeated,” recalled Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and scientific sleuth at the University of Sydney. “It was obvious that this was cooked.”

He rejected the manuscript, informing both the corresponding author, Reyhan Polat of the University of Health Sciences in Ankara and Etlik City Hospital, in Turkey, and her institution about his concerns. He also made a mental note to have a look at the researcher’s published work. Over the following years, that effort drew in another sleuth and eventually prompted inquiries into more than two dozen papers by a network of researchers in Turkey.

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