by publisher – Retraction Watch

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.

Technobabble papers by professor and editor under scrutiny

After we reached out to Eren Öğüt, his profiles at Google Scholar, ORCID and Frontiers’ Loop all vanished.

The reviewer, a neuroscientist in Germany, was confused. The manuscript on her screen, describing efforts to model a thin layer of gray matter in the brain called the indusium griseum, seemed oddly devoid of gist. The figures in the single-authored article made little sense, the MATLAB functions provided were irrelevant, the discussion failed to engage with the results and felt more like a review of the literature.

And, the reviewer wondered, was the resolution of the publicly available MRI data the manuscript purported to analyze sufficient to visualize the delicate anatomical structure in the first place? She turned to a colleague who sat in the same office. An expert in analyzing brain images, he confirmed her suspicion: The resolution was too low. (Both researchers spoke to us on condition of anonymity.)

The reviewer suggested rejecting the manuscript, which had been submitted to Springer Nature’s Brain Topography. But in November, just a few weeks later, the colleague she had consulted received an invitation to review the same paper, this time for Scientific Reports. He accepted out of curiosity. A figure supposed to depict the indusium griseum but showing a simple sine wave baffled him. “You look at that and think, well, this is not looking like an anatomical structure,” he told us.

Nature retracts paper for data manipulation by Ph.D. student

Nature has retracted a paper after an investigation at a U.K. institution found the first author — then a doctoral student — manipulated data.

The paper, which looked at the sensitivity of lung cancers to immunotherapy, appeared in April 2023 and has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice published today states first author Kevin Ng was responsible for the manipulation in the paper, including manipulated data in several figures. At the time of the experiments, Ng was a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London under the supervision of co-corresponding author George Kassiotis.

Sage journal retracts more than 40 papers over concerns with peer review, author contributions

Sage has retracted 45 papers from one of its journals for questionable authorship and peer review.

The publisher began an investigation into Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation last year to address citation concerns, a Sage spokesperson told Retraction Watch. The journal was one of 20 titles that lost their impact factors in Clarivate’s 2025 Journal Citation Reports for excessive self-citation and citation stacking.

Sage retracted the articles due to “concerns around the peer review process underlying these articles and author contributions to these articles, as well as the integrity of the research process,” according to the retraction notice, published November 23. The publisher detected “one or more” issues in each of the papers, including patterns of citation manipulation, indicators of third-party involvement and problems with peer review.

Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

Elsevier has pulled a dozen papers by a finance professor in Ireland who oversaw the review of the articles and made “the final decision” to publish them in three journals he edited, according to the retraction notices.

The professor, Brian M. Lucey of Trinity College Dublin, and his coauthors disagreed with the retractions, which came a few days before Christmas.

“I’m not disputing the fact that I made the final decision” to publish the articles, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations, Lucey told us in an interview. ”What I’m disputing is that that is not prima facie grounds” for retracting them.

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