by publisher – Retraction Watch

Elsevier retracts study tying sudden infant death syndrome to vaccinations

Elsevier has retracted a 2021 study claiming sudden infant death syndrome is linked to vaccines over concerns the paper might influence patient care.

The single-author study, by longtime vaccine critic Neil Z. Miller and published in Toxicology Reports, found 75 percent of SIDS cases reported occurred within seven days of vaccination, suggesting the fatalities are tied to immunizations. In an April 9 notice, Elsevier said it initiated an investigation into the paper after concerns arose from readers about potential research errors and methodological flaws.

According to the removal notice, editor-in-chief Lawrence H. Lash determined the author’s response did not “satisfactorily address” the concerns, particularly, the “serious methodological flaws” in using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to infer a correlation between vaccination and SIDS.

Critics of birdsong study fight to be named in Nature’s retraction

A zebra finch in New South Wales, Australia. *Source: JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)*

Researchers who flagged methodological issues in a paper on birdsong a year and a half before Nature retracted it say they should be credited in the editorial notice. But the editors have refused, with one telling the critics the paper was retracted for unrelated reasons.

The March 2024 study at the center of the dispute looked at how sexual selection may drive song patterns in male zebra finches. Nature retracted the paper last month because two of the synthetic song pairs used in the study were found to be unreliable, according to the notice. All three authors agreed to the retraction.

Todd Roberts, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch the critics now asking for credit “prompted us to check the synthetic song pairs used in our paper.” He said his team did not do the reliability analysis of the pairs until after publication.

How the media hypes “research that is absurd on its face”

Aaron Brown says his new book, Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth from a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation, “isn’t an exposé of fraud—Retraction Watch covers that ground. It’s about legitimate-looking research that is absurd on its face.”

Published this month by Wiley, Brown uses dozens of case studies to show “why widely reported and influential studies in top journals are not just wrong, but obviously and egregiously illogical or contrary to simple fact. My focus is less on the policy and statistical errors than on why no one seems to care,” he says.

Brown is a risk manager working in hedge fund management. He also teaches statistics at New York University and the University of California San Diego and writes columns for Reason and Bloomberg, among other outlets. We asked him to tell us more about how he thinks about the nexus of science, journalism and the publish-or-perish system that also pushes researchers to engage with non-experts to promote their work.

Elsevier journal removes two 42-year-old papers on cesium as a cancer treatment

An Elsevier journal has removed two papers on a discredited alternative treatment for cancer nearly half a century after they were published, after researchers found a quarter of patients in case reports of the therapy, cesium chloride, died from taking the substance.

Some alternative medicine advocates marketed cesium chloride as a cancer treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, although the risks and ineffectiveness of the therapy have been known for decades. In 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about “significant safety risks” associated with the salt.

Marcel van der Heyden, a professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, told Retraction Watch he and his students came across the articles while writing a review of case reports on the use of cesium. Although the therapy was supported online and in health books, he said, all pointed to two 1984 papers in Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior: “Cesium therapy in cancer patients” by Hellfried Sartori and “The high pH therapy for cancer tests on mice and humans” by Aubrey Keith Brewer.

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

*Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).*

While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.

“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”

Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.

Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs

An appeals court in Switzerland has overturned a 2025 defamation conviction against a sleuth who had identified dozens of conference proceedings with signs of citation manipulation. The ruling orders the plaintiff to pay the sleuth’s legal expenses.

The judgment clears Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, in a lawsuit filed against him in 2023 by Shadi Aljawarneh, a computer scientist at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.

The case stemmed from a blog post Pirelli published in January 2023 summarizing problems with the proceedings of conferences organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Aljawarneh was the chair of most of the conferences, and the proceedings included signs of citation stuffing in Aljawarneh’s favor.

Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed

In August 2021, several news outlets in Russia reported a cancer breakthrough: Researchers at the chemistry and biophysics institutes affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences had developed a new kind of nanoparticle that could help detect breast cancer in an MRI and kill tumor cells at the same time. State-run media and several Russian science outlets reported on the study over the next few days.

But four years later, Journal of Materials Chemistry B, the journal that had published the paper, retracted it.

The publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry, found the paper contained repeating patterns in the electron microscopy data and several images depicting cells that were identical to those included in a later paper with a number of the same authors. The authors — who include Vladimir Ivanov, director of Russia’s Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, and Alexander Baranchikov, also at the institute — all agreed to the retraction.

Researcher claims his case report was stolen by someone else at his hospital

A researcher claims a case report he coauthored was plagiarized by doctors at the same institution three years later — a paper he was alerted to when a journal sent it to him for review.

Moayad Alqurashi, an infectious diseases specialist at King Fahad Armed Forces Hospital in Saudi Arabia, was the lead author on a 2021 case report published in Cureus about a patient who came to the emergency room with rapid vision loss. Doctors eventually diagnosed the patient with neurosyphilis, with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, as the presenting symptom. At the time, Alqurashi was a trainee at Prince Sultan Military Medical City in Riyadh.

Alqurashi told Retraction Watch that in 2023, while a reviewer for Skin Health and Disease, a Wiley title, he was invited to assess a report similar to the case he had written about. He said he notified the journal of similarities between the two cases, and the journal never published the report. The authors of that article had seen the same patient as part of a different department.

Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

The market for fake authorship on a research paper has prices to match every budget, according to a new dataset compiled from thousands of advertisements on social media platforms and paper mill websites.

The dataset, called BuyTheBy, is the first systematic attempt to understand the market for paper mill products, according to its creators. It compiles more than 18,000 text-based advertisements from seven paper mills operating across India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, collected at various points between March 2020 to April 2026. The researchers found prices vary widely depending on geography, ranging from $56 to $5,631 for a first author slot, according to a preprint submitted to arXiv.

Several of the advertisements appear to correspond with published papers subsequently published in the targeted journals, with identical titles to those advertised. But cracking down on the industry with datasets such as these will be difficult, some experts say, especially as the business model evolves rapidly with AI.

Another retraction and two investigations for chemist

A chemist in Austria who earned a retraction earlier this year is under investigation by his former university, a national research integrity agency and the publisher Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned, while scrutiny of his publication record has broadened to include more papers flagged on PubPeer.

Maximilian Lackner, a technical chemist and process engineer at FH Technikum Wien in Austria until October last year, according to his ORCID profile, was the senior and corresponding author on a paper in npj Science of Food retracted in January after publishers discovered the five of the cited references weren’t relevant to the claims they were meant to be supporting. The 2024 article has been cited 90 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Editors also pointed out the information in a flow diagram for selecting studies didn’t appear anywhere else in the article. One of the authors, Fatemeh Ahmadi of the University of Western Australia, told the journal she and Lackner disagreed with the retraction. When we asked why, Ahmadi said the authors were “not interested” in our request for further information.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: