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.
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 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:
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.
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 contestedmeta-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.
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 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 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.
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.
A Cell Press journal quietly removed part of a funding statement from a paper related to gender-affirming hormone therapy that the authors say was included in error. Experts called the move “worrying.”
The authors of the paper, which appeared in Cell Reports on September 23, gave estrogen therapy to male monkeys to better understand how hormone therapies used in gender clinics might affect the immune system.
The research drew attention from several conservative news organizations, some of which called the project “disturbing” and alleged the work cost millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding.
The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation.
Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Astana, has written or coauthored 480 papers indexed on Scopus, and one analysis puts him as the third most cited researcher in Kazakhstan. His prolific publication record has been linked to Russian paper mills, though those claims are unverified. Zdorovets has defended his work in a series of online posts, arguing the imaging similarities come from technical issues and that his own analyses prove image manipulation did not occur. He did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.
The latest retraction for Zdorovets came last month when Crystallography Reports retracted a study containing electron microscope images “highly similar” to those published a year earlier in a now-retracted paper in the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry by a similar group of authors. Both papers also included images that closely resemble ones Zdorovets and his colleagues presented at a nanomaterials conference in Ukraine in 2017. In each instance, the images were meant to be showing different materials.
