by publisher – Retraction Watch

Botanists plant a stake in oral cancer research with case report, now under investigation

Elsevier is investigating a case report of a person with aggressive cancer, written by three plant researchers working far afield of their specialty.

The three authors of the study, published June 2024 in Oral Oncology Reports, purport to diagnose a 63-year-old man with a rare, aggressive form of oral cancer. The journal is a companion title to Elsevier’s Oral Oncology according to the homepage, but is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Corresponding author Velmani Sankaravel told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues found the case report from an “online open-access source” and then used it “to support our research on plant-based diagnostics for oral cancer.” However, the paper lists CT scans, biopsies, and other routine diagnostic tests and makes no mention of plant-based diagnostic tools.

Bug in Springer Nature metadata may be causing ‘significant, systemic’ citation inflation

Millions of researchers could be affected by a “dramatic distortion of citation counts” likely caused by flaws in how the academic publishing giant Springer Nature handles article metadata, according to a new preprint.

The bug means a large number of citations are automatically attributed to the first paper in a given journal volume, instead of to whichever paper in that volume they were intended for. The issue appears to affect many of the publisher’s online-only titles, such as Nature Communications, Scientific Reports and several BMC journals.

“It seems that millions of scientists lost a few citations, while tens of thousands, the authors of Article 1s, gained all these, leading to insane citation counts,” Tamás Kriváchy of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, in Spain, told us. His findings appeared earlier this month on arXiv.org. And those citation losses and gains are through no fault (or intention) of the authors themselves. In fact, one author we spoke with has tried, without success, to get mistaken citations removed from her paper.

Journal retracts ‘bizarre’ placebo effect paper

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in December 2024, analyzed 30 clinical trials examining treatments for a total of five conditions. The authors concluded “the placebo-effect is the major driver of treatment effects in clinical trials that alone explains 69% of the variance.” It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The last author of the study is Harald Walach, who may be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch. In one now-retracted paper, Walach and his coauthors claimed the COVID-19 vaccines killed two people for every three deaths they prevented. In a different, also retracted paper, Walach and colleagues claimed children’s masks trap carbon dioxide. (They later republished the article in a different journal.)

Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff

In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting. Kim hadn’t been told about the paper, nor had anyone asked his permission to use the data. The findings were central to Kim’s Ph.D. thesis and publishing them would mean the data were no longer original.

“I was shaking in the lab,” he recalled recently. “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He wanted to be credited as a coauthor on any papers using his results. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper.

Dozens of board members resign from big-data journal after mass staff firings

More than three-fifths of the editorial board of a biomedical sciences journal resigned after the publication’s operations moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China, and the editors and software team were fired with 30 days’ notice.

GigaScience is published in partnership between Oxford University Press and GigaScience Press, the publishing division of BGI, a genomics company based in Shenzhen, according to their website.

On October 29, B.F. Francis Ouellette, a bioinformatics consultant, sent the resignation notice in an email addressed to Oxford University Press and the new editor-in-chief of the journal, Xun Xu. According to the email, which was signed by 30 of the journal’s 49 board members, those resigning became “increasingly concerned about the recent structural and editorial changes at GigaScience and how they may affect the journal’s long-standing commitment to publishing rigorously reviewed, reproducible research.”

Former Australian science agency ecology researcher loses two papers

One of the retracted papers proposed an epigenetic clock to estimate the age of sea turtles.
*Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0*)

A molecular ecology researcher has lost two papers and received an expression of concern for a third after coauthors flagged data issues with the papers.

All three papers appeared in Molecular Ecology Resources and describe the use of DNA methylation as an epigenetic clock to predict the age of different animals. The journal retracted two of the studies in July. The first, published in June 2021, estimated ages for three threatened fish species. The second appeared in April 2022 and proposes a clock for predicting the age of sea turtles. The articles have been cited 41 and 32 times, respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The lead author on those two studies was Benjamin Mayne, formerly a researcher at Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), based in Canberra.

Widespread image reuse, manipulation uncovered in animal studies of brain injury

One of the papers in the analysis contained a figure (bottom) found to have overlap with other work by the same author (top). Both papers have been retracted.
*Annotated images: PubPeer*

More than 200 papers on ways to prevent brain injury after a stroke contain problematic images, according to an analysis published today in PLOS Biology. Researchers found dozens of duplicated Western blots and reused images of tissues and cells purportedly showing different experimental conditions — both within a single paper and across separate publications.

As we reported last year, René Aquarius and Kim Wever, of the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, first noticed these patterns in 2023 when they started working on a systematic review of animal studies in the field. They had wanted to identify promising interventions for preventing early brain injury following hemorrhagic stroke. Instead, their efforts turned into an audit of suspicious papers in their field.

Of the 608 studies they analyzed, more than 240, or 40 percent, contained problematic images. So far, 19 of those articles have been retracted and 55 corrected, mostly from the researchers’ efforts to alert journals and publishers about the issues. Almost 90 percent of the problematic papers had a corresponding author based in China, and many appeared in major journals such as Stroke, Brain Research and Molecular Neurobiology.

Exclusive: American Heart Association reviewing award to rocket scientist with seven retractions

The American Heart Association is reviewing its decision to give an award to the architect of a controversial theory that is the subject of ~~eight~~ seven retracted papers, Retraction Watch has learned. In the meantime, the researcher is using the award to contest several of the retractions.

The Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award “recognizes the team of authors with the highest-ranked scientific abstract from every participating country for each AHA scientific meeting,” according to the award website.

At its Basic Cardiovascular Sciences 2025 conference in July, the association gave the award for best abstract from India to work describing “Sanal flow choking” theory, which is named after lead author, V. R. Sanal Kumar, a professor of aerospace engineering at Amity University in New Delhi. As we have previously reported, some scientists have denounced the concept as “absolute nonsense” and “inaccurate and paradoxical” — and earlier this year, a journal said it “fundamentally violates” a law of thermodynamics.

Less is more: Academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes

Academic publishing needs “renewed focus and collective action” to embrace new approaches and ensure the future of the industry, concludes a report from Cambridge University Press, released last week.

What started as an exploration of barriers to open access models turned into a call for “radical change” in academic publishing. “It has been clear for some time that the publishing ecosystem is under increasing strain,” Mandy Hill, managing director of Cambridge University Press, wrote in the introduction to the report. “This was the case before the growth of open access, but it is also clear that the shift to open has not solved the problems, as some early open access advocates may have hoped.”

The report, which followed workshops and interviews with stakeholders, includes results of a survey of more than 3,000 researchers, librarians, funders, publishers and societies.

Iraqi dean earns another retraction for paper posted for sale on Facebook

A dean and professor at a public university in Iraq has lost another paper just weeks after we reported he was up to 16 retractions for authorship manipulation, fake peer review and other problems.

Yasser Fakri Mustafa of the University of Mosul was a coauthor of the newly retracted article, a review of how aerosol boxes affected intubation during the COVID‐19 pandemic. He denied wrongdoing.

As stated in the retraction notice, online September 23, the article’s title matched an authorship ad posted on social media on March 9, 2022, eight months before the paper appeared in Taylor & Francis’ Expert Review of Medical Devices.

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