by journal – Retraction Watch

Widely criticized keto diet study retracted

A 2025 paper claiming the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques has been retracted after widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims. The journal found “the identified errors are too great to be corrected with a corrigendum,” according to the March 11 retraction notice.

In April 2025, JACC: Advances published the study, which looked at plaque build-up in 100 otherwise generally healthy people who had experienced an increase in their cholesterol levels while being on a keto diet. The study claimed scans performed one year apart by the company Cleerly showed the diet was not associated with the development of arterial plaques.

This finding went against what previous studies had found, and it led to what Wired called “a new war in the nutrition world.”

‘Comically bad’ datasets used to train clinical models for stroke and diabetes

A dataset on Kaggle purportedly showing people who have had a stroke includes images of Sylvester Stallone from *Rambo* and other celebrities. *Source*

Scrolling through an online image dataset, Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, pointed out a few familiar faces. Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, and then again on the red carpet. “This is just ridiculous,” Barnett said. George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig all appear more than once, often with the same image. “You can see,” Barnett said, “this is just a comically bad dataset.”

This particular dataset, collected in a folder titled “droopy” and hosted on an open-source repository called Kaggle, underpins a paper published in Scientific Reports – not as a find-the-celebrity game, but as a training set for a predictive clinical model for early detection of strokes.

The paper is the most recent example of a much wider problem that Barnett and his Ph.D. student Alexander Gibson have documented with Kaggle, which is owned by Google and hosts datasets uploaded by users that researchers and machine learning practitioners can use to build predictive models. By examining two other Kaggle datasets on stroke and diabetes, both of which included tabular patient data, Gibson and Barnett traced how the data move through the scientific literature and in some cases, into clinical use. Their work, described in a preprint posted to medRxiv in February, already has led to several retractions of the papers using these dubious datasets.

Nine years after journalist raised concerns, BMJ Group journal retracts stent paper

A BMJ Group journal has retracted a paper nearly nine years after a journalist raised concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest and the study’s details contradicting those of its trial registration. The researchers also excluded a patient’s death from the study, the retraction notice says.

The study, published in Open Heart in May 2017, described the results of a clinical trial that tested commercially available stents with microengineered grooves produced by Abbott Vascular.

But four months later, veteran cardiology journalist Larry Husten pointed out the clinical trial registration described a plan to employ two stents produced by a different device maker – Palmaz Scientific, a company that funded the work and was owned by one of the authors. He also wrote that records “indicate that one patient in the trial died as a result of pancreatitis. It seems unlikely that this was related to the stent but shouldn’t this information have been reported in the Open Heart paper?”

Elsevier journal removes two 42-year-old papers on cesium as a cancer treatment

An Elsevier journal has removed two papers on a discredited alternative treatment for cancer nearly half a century after they were published, after researchers found a quarter of patients in case reports of the therapy, cesium chloride, died from taking the substance.

Some alternative medicine advocates marketed cesium chloride as a cancer treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, although the risks and ineffectiveness of the therapy have been known for decades. In 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about “significant safety risks” associated with the salt.

Marcel van der Heyden, a professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, told Retraction Watch he and his students came across the articles while writing a review of case reports on the use of cesium. Although the therapy was supported online and in health books, he said, all pointed to two 1984 papers in Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior: “Cesium therapy in cancer patients” by Hellfried Sartori and “The high pH therapy for cancer tests on mice and humans” by Aubrey Keith Brewer.

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

*Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).*

While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.

“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”

Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.

Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs

An appeals court in Switzerland has overturned a 2025 defamation conviction against a sleuth who had identified dozens of conference proceedings with signs of citation manipulation. The ruling orders the plaintiff to pay the sleuth’s legal expenses.

The judgment clears Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, in a lawsuit filed against him in 2023 by Shadi Aljawarneh, a computer scientist at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.

The case stemmed from a blog post Pirelli published in January 2023 summarizing problems with the proceedings of conferences organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Aljawarneh was the chair of most of the conferences, and the proceedings included signs of citation stuffing in Aljawarneh’s favor.

One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

*Figure from correspondence to* The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today.

The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828. The researchers, led by Maxim Topaz of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, used AI to “distinguish genuine fabrications from formatting discrepancies such as informally abbreviated titles.”

Topaz’s group located the sharpest increase in hallucinated references in mid-2024, which they note coincided with the rise of AI writing tools. The findings come as Nature reported last month that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 “might include invalid references generated by AI.” Retraction Watch has seen its fair share of reports of hallucinated citations generated by LLMs like ChatGPT.

Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed

In August 2021, several news outlets in Russia reported a cancer breakthrough: Researchers at the chemistry and biophysics institutes affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences had developed a new kind of nanoparticle that could help detect breast cancer in an MRI and kill tumor cells at the same time. State-run media and several Russian science outlets reported on the study over the next few days.

But four years later, Journal of Materials Chemistry B, the journal that had published the paper, retracted it.

The publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry, found the paper contained repeating patterns in the electron microscopy data and several images depicting cells that were identical to those included in a later paper with a number of the same authors. The authors — who include Vladimir Ivanov, director of Russia’s Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, and Alexander Baranchikov, also at the institute — all agreed to the retraction.

NEJM retracts case study for AI-manipulated imagery

An “Images in Clinical Medicine” item in the *New England Journal of Medicine* has been retracted after the authors acknowledged using AI to alter the photo. *Y. Wang, X. Mu/© The New England Journal of Medicine (2026)*.

The New England Journal of Medicine has retracted a clinical image with a picture the authors admit was manipulated with artificial intelligence.

The short piece, published April 18, reported the case of an 87-year-old man with lung damage after being exposed to a forest fire. The report included a startling image of black “casts” taken from the man’s airways, the size of which can be gauged by a tape measure at the top of the picture.

The dramatic visual drew attention in the media (and one news outlet has already noted the retraction at the time of this writing). But the authors, Yuling Wang and Xiangdong Mu, of Daxing Teaching Hospital and Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, respectively, acknowledged having used AI to superimpose the tape ruler in the figure.

Researcher claims his case report was stolen by someone else at his hospital

A researcher claims a case report he coauthored was plagiarized by doctors at the same institution three years later — a paper he was alerted to when a journal sent it to him for review.

Moayad Alqurashi, an infectious diseases specialist at King Fahad Armed Forces Hospital in Saudi Arabia, was the lead author on a 2021 case report published in Cureus about a patient who came to the emergency room with rapid vision loss. Doctors eventually diagnosed the patient with neurosyphilis, with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, as the presenting symptom. At the time, Alqurashi was a trainee at Prince Sultan Military Medical City in Riyadh.

Alqurashi told Retraction Watch that in 2023, while a reviewer for Skin Health and Disease, a Wiley title, he was invited to assess a report similar to the case he had written about. He said he notified the journal of similarities between the two cases, and the journal never published the report. The authors of that article had seen the same patient as part of a different department.

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