by publisher – Retraction Watch

Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

A screenshot of Louis’ LinkedIn profile before we reached out to him.

Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on our leaderboard.

The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses.

Louis – who also goes by Louis Hitler Muzong – did not respond to Retraction Watch’s requests for comment. Until recently, his LinkedIn page named him as a Ph.D. student in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, with an expected completion date of October 2027. But retraction notices for two papers say Louis requested his Leeds affiliation be removed. One states “the research described in the article is not associated with that institution,” and the other that the affiliation “was given incorrectly.” The University of Leeds did not respond to a request to verify whether he was a student there.

Publisher flags more than 120 papers three and a half years after learning of problems

What started as a small editorial conundrum several years ago has turned into an expression of concern for dozens of papers in a medical journal, thanks to the work of an Australian physician and scientific sleuth.

In February 2022, we wrote about the decision by publisher Wolters Kluwer to retract a table that was missing in a paper in Medicine. In the end the journal pulled the whole article, which described a protocol for a clinical trial, because its authors had “not responded to multiple requests.”

The story left one reader intrigued. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said John Loadsman of the University of Sydney, an anesthesiologist and journal editor. “I thought, I’ve got to have a look.”

Porn addiction recovery group sues publisher, UCLA researcher over critical paper

An online peer support group for people overcoming addiction to pornography has filed a lawsuit against the authors of a paper critical of the group, as well as the publisher Taylor & Francis, in an attempt to get the article retracted.

The 2023 study, published in Deviant Behavior, found the Reddit channel for the group NoFap had a higher rate of posts containing violent language compared with two similar subreddits.

Study coauthors Nicole Prause, a bioinformatics programmer with the University of California, Los Angeles, and clinical psychologist David Ley are named defendants in the lawsuit, filed December 30. NoFap and the group’s founder, Alexander Rhodes, are plaintiffs in the suit, which alleges the authors manipulated the data to make the subreddit seem uniquely violent.

Correction to a retraction highlights tortured phrases have been around longer than LLMs

Corrections to retractions have also been around longer than AI tools like the one that created this image. *DALL-E*

While large language models are taking the blame for hallucinations, punctuation and all manner of language choices these days, turns of phrase were being tortured well before the arrival of LLMs.

Overlooking that fact seems to have led to a recent correction to a retraction – yes, you read that right – in Sage’s Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology. The original article, published in February 2022, was on detecting coronary artery plaques. It contained several known tortured phrases, synonyms and rephrasings — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors.

For instance, the paper used the term “cardiovascular breakdown” for “heart failure”; “outward appearance acknowledgement” instead of “face recognition”; and “attractive resonance” for “magnetic resonance.”

Journal tags ‘impossible’ case report with short erratum

Last August, a reader alerted the editor of a medical journal to a recent case report “riddled with irreconcilable contradictions, medically impossible claims, fictional terminology, and ethical lapses.”

The paper, about a woman who allegedly suffered an aortic aneurysm rupture three days after giving birth, stated that written “informed consent was obtained from the patient for publication.” But the woman died less than two hours after arriving in the emergency room, according to the report.

“If she did not survive, she could not have provided consent post-event,” the concerned reader pointed out in an email to Riaz Agha, editor-in-chief of Annals of Medicine and Surgery, which published the case report in April.

Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit

Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.

Clarivate put Heliyon on hold in September 2024, citing concerns about the quality of the content. The “on-hold” status indicates a journal is being re-evaluated, and new content isn’t indexed, according to documentation on the Clarivate website. A spokesperson for Clarivate told us they couldn’t comment on specific journals, but said a journal must be both taken off hold and have its missing content backfilled by August 1 in order to receive an impact factor for that year. If a journal is still on hold and content hasn’t been backfilled, the journal will not receive an impact factor, the spokesperson said.

Heliyon published over 11,000 papers in 2023 and more than 17,000 in 2024, issuing around two dozen retractions in each year. Last year, the journal published 3,168 articles and retracted 392 others.

Medical journal publishes a letter on AI with a fake reference to itself

We’ve seen all kinds of articles that got published despite having references that don’t exist. But this was a new one: a paper with a made-up reference to the journal in which it appears.

While nonexistent references can indicate the use of a large language model in generating text, the authors maintain they used AI according to the journal’s guidelines.

The letter to the editor, published in December 2024 in Intensive Care Medicine, explored ways AI could help clinicians monitor blood circulation in patients in intensive care units. The 750-word letter included 15 references.

Lawsuit fails to block retraction of paper claiming to link heart-related deaths to COVID-19 vaccines

*Greg J. Marchand in a photo from his research institute’s website.*

A Taylor & Francis journal has retracted a widely-read paper linking cardiac-related mortality to COVID-19 vaccines after an unsuccessful legal attempt by the lead author to block the withdrawal. That author says he is considering further legal action against the publisher.

The article, “Risk of all-cause and cardiac-related mortality after vaccination against COVID-19: A meta-analysis of self-controlled case series studies,” drew swift criticism when it was published in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics in August 2023. At the time, critics and sleuths were quick to challenge the data and methods used in the paper, which now has more than 143,000 views on the Taylor & Francis website and has been cited 15 times, including by two letters to the editor of the journal and a response from the authors, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, posted online January 16, states the retraction resulted from concerns that arose about the methodology of the study and the integrity and availability of the data. The authors provided a full response to the queries; however, the publisher determined the validity of the findings remained in question, the notice states. It continues:

Fed up, author issues her own retraction after journal ghosts her

At wit’s end after a publisher ignored her repeated requests for a correction, Ursula Bellut-Staeck took the extreme step of issuing her own retraction. But is that even a thing?

Bellut-Staeck, an independent researcher from Berlin, Germany, submitted a paper to SCIREA Journal of Clinical Medicine last spring after receiving an invitation from the journal. The article, about mechanotransduction and the impact of infrasound and vibrations, was published June 16.

But when Bellut-Staeck realized her affiliation as listed on the article needed changing, she contacted the journal to request a correction. The problem, she said, was linguistic. Because she didn’t realize “affiliation” has a different meaning in German than English, she had mistakenly listed herself as being at an institution she has since left.

Up in smoke: Publisher pulls vaping paper nearly two years after complaint

MDPI has retracted a study about vaping that one expert said seemed “like a joke” almost two years after the publisher received a complaint about the flawed work.

The paper, published in Neurology International in 2022, reported e-cigarette users had a higher risk of early stroke than traditional tobacco users. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and was covered in the media, featured in a public campaign against vaping and included in a contested meta-analysis.

But the study contained critical errors, as we reported in 2024 in a story for Science that investigated paper mill-like businesses dangling quick-and-dirty publications for international medical graduates looking for residency positions in the United States.

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