by journal – Retraction Watch

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?

*Mark Barnes (courtesy of Ropes and Gray LLC)*

In an editorial published today in Science, Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes call for greater transparency in investigations of scientific misconduct with an aim toward making sure prospective academic employers know of applicants’ past misdeeds. As we’ve reported, in the absence of transparency around findings of misconduct, some universities have discovered too late they hired someone who has turned out to be a serial offender.

Lauer, who served as Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health from 2015-2025, and Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions, propose a tracking system similar to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). That database logs adverse actions and malpractice payments as a way to inform decisions about individual physicians by hospitals. As Lauer and Barnes note, federal law “requires a hospital to query the NPDB whenever it is considering a new applicant for medical privileges, as well as to conduct repeat queries every 2 years to make sure information on staff is up to date.” We asked Barnes to elaborate on the ideas presented in the op-ed. (He notes he is speaking only for himself here.)

Retraction Watch: You write in your op-ed universities may avoid sharing personal information — presumably including results of misconduct investigations — for fear of legal claims of defamation or violations of privacy. Are those fears valid?

Publisher changes citation, registration policies following Retraction Watch investigation

*Wolters Kluwer global headquarters in the Netherlands*

The Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer has scrapped some of its citation and study-registration requirements at a top-ranked surgery journal founded by the U.K. plastic surgeon Riaz Agha, Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows our investigation last month that found mandatory citation of reporting guidelines developed by Agha and published 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.

A blanket requirement to register all human studies before manuscript submission, contrary to recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, appeared to serve another of Agha’s business interests: a paid research registry he founded in 2015.

Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’

A judge has dismissed a legal challenge aimed at forcing Elsevier to retract a long-criticized study that concluded the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens.

The 2001 paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), has faced scrutiny for more than 20 years by critics who say the study has led to unwarranted and potentially harmful prescribing of the drug to youth. As we reported last October, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper shortly after a lawsuit was filed by attorney George W. Murgatroyd III against the journal’s owner, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and Elsevier, which publishes the title.

In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Murgatroyd claimed the journal is violating the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by continuing to “publish, distribute, and sell a fraudulent scientific article that contains material facts” that mislead the public and endanger adolescent mental health and safety. AACAP and Elsevier are profiting from the article by charging readers to buy access to the paper, according to the complaint.

BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’

The BMJ has retracted a paper on stem cell therapy for heart failure after sleuths flagged the work for “serious” inconsistencies in data.

Published in October, the paper reported the results of a phase III clinical trial of more than 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, looking at whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack. The journal announced the results in a press release, and news of the findings appeared in several outlets. New Scientist called the study the “strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself.”

A week after the study was published, sleuths took to PubPeer to point out inconsistencies between the data reported in the article and the dataset uploaded with it. The concerns included a “curious repeating pattern” of records in the dataset and a high number of integers for the height and weight of patients.

The Lancet retracts half-century-old unsigned commentary on talc for undisclosed industry ties

The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products.

The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defense attorneys to claim scientific proof of talc products’ safety, according to critics. But one such attorney says the paper “would not be relied upon to any significant degree.”

Published in 1977, the article argued against government-mandated regulatory testing for asbestos in cosmetic talc. Around that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering such monitoring, a task that ultimately became the responsibility of cosmetics companies.

Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board

Springer Nature has launched a new agriculture journal under the troubled Cureus brand. As part of its launch, the publisher invited at least one researcher with irrelevant specialities to join its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.

The new journal comes after Clarivate’s Web of Science delisting the original and long-embattled Cureus Journal of Medical Science in October for concerns about article quality.

The flagship Cureus was founded in 2009 by John Adler Jr., a Stanford University neurosurgeon, as an open-access journal for clinicians who didn’t have grants. Springer Nature acquired the journal in December 2022. In 2024, the publisher launched Cureus Journals — open-access journals on engineering, computer science and business — using the brand name.

Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire

In the summer of 2022, a researcher in Indonesia submitted a case report to Annals of Medicine and Surgery, one of several open-access journals founded and edited by Riaz Agha, a plastic surgeon and publisher in London. The manuscript, Agha responded, needed various changes to be considered for publication.

Among them: It should cite Agha’s paper on how to write surgical case reports, published two years earlier in the highly ranked International Journal of Surgery (IJS), the plastic surgeon’s flagship publication.

“Thanks Sir,” the Indonesian researcher replied. “I’ve added [the reference] to the manuscript.”

Although practices vary, the journals Agha founded aren’t alone in requiring authors to follow, and sometimes even cite, reporting guidelines. But a conflict of interest can arise when an editor demands authors reference guideline papers published in the editor’s own journals – as Agha does in his instructions to authors, reporting guidelines and editorial correspondence.

Former Mount Sinai postdoc falsified images in grant updates, ORI says

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned a former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York for manipulating images in two grant updates and a manuscript.

Chen-Yeh “George” Ke committed research misconduct by intentionally falsifying images in an unpublished manuscript supported by federal funds and by reporting the fabricated results in two research performance progress reports, according to a summary published March 10 on the ORI website and to be published in the Federal Register.

Ke, now a manager at Level Biotechnology in Taiwan, according to LinkedIn, did not return messages seeking comment. A spokesperson from Mount Sinai acknowledged our message but did not comment before our deadline.

Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions

In a now-retracted paper, the authors report they found shocked quartz formed by an airburst from clouds of comet fragments that hit earth more than 12,000 years ago. *Source*

PLOS One has retracted two papers from the Comet Research Group, a controversial cadre of researchers who, according to their webpage, seek “to find evidence about comet impacts and raise awareness about them before your city is next.”

The same research group was also behind a September 2021 paper — published in Scientific Reports and covered by Retraction Watch here, here, and here — that claimed a cosmic airburst flattened the city of Tall el-Hammam 3,600 years ago, providing physical support for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The widely publicized paper was retracted last April after mounting concerns from outside researchers about the methodology, interpretations and data in the article.

The group’s two new papers focus on different aspects of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which posits that a “disentangling comet” broke up in Earth’s atmosphere before plummeting to the ground, initiating a comet-driven cataclysm that leveled humans and mammoths and much else approximately 12,800 years ago.

Journal retracts GLP-1 study after researcher questions central finding

After reading a recent study about GLP-1 treatment in the International Journal of Obesity, David B. Allison immediately became skeptical about the paper’s analysis. The article, published in May 2024, found people who combined a GLP-1 therapy with another weight loss drug lost more weight than patients on a GLP-1 therapy alone.

“I could not really comprehend exactly what analysis they did,” Allison, chief of nutrition and director of the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told Retraction Watch. “And more so, I could not comprehend how the analysis they did would give results that would be informative of the conclusions they drew. So I was scratching my head a little bit.”

The IJO paper was a retrospective cohort study of adults with obesity who had been prescribed a GLP-1 therapy, specifically Saxenda and Ozempic. The study compared patients who received a GLP-1 alone with those receiving the GLP-1 therapy and then had bupropion/naltrexone added to their regimen. The Food and Drug Administration approved bupropion/naltrexone in 2014 for chronic weight management in obese adults.

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