While reading a chapter from a 2024 book on restoring biodiversity in post-industrial land earlier this month, an ecologist came across a reference to a study on rewilding she wanted to look up.
But the ecologist, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the chapter authors, couldn’t find a record of the 2020 paper, purportedly published in Ambio by “Knijn et al.” She decided to check the other references. She told Retraction Watch she found at least eight that didn’t exist.
The ecologist flagged the issue to the book’s publisher, Wiley, on September 7 but told us she never heard back, aside from an automated response.
Union members at The Lancet and its affiliated journals will go on strike Sept. 22 for one day with further action planned for the following week, after pay negotiations with parent publisher Elsevier fell apart, The Lancet’s union announced today.
The strike is the first in The Lancet’s 200-year history. Elsevier was ordered to recognize the union, a chapter of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), in September 2025, and their collective bargaining agreement was finalized in February. As part of the action the union, which represents 110 employees in various roles across several of The Lancet’s 30 journals, is also calling on members to refuse to work hours outside their contracted amount.
Negotiations on pay and support for workers began in March when the union asked for a 7.5% pay raise in the first year. According to an open letter from the union, workers’ pay had failed to keep up with inflation, leaving them “substantially worse off than they were five years ago despite their growing expertise and responsibilities.”
A banner message on the Diabetes Care website tells visitors they “continue to actively accept and appropriately review all new and previously submitted manuscripts,” which contradicts a statement the journal’s editors posted last week announcing a boycott of ADA activities, including manuscript review.
Tensions between the American Diabetes Association and several editors of its flagship journal — who have boycotted the group over its handling of a protest at the association’s June conference — have again boiled over, this time on the website of the journal.
Steven Kahn, editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care and professor of medicine at the University of Washington, was one of five researchers ejected from the association’s June meeting in New Orleans for distributing copies of a Diabetes Care editorial on funding cuts outside the hall where National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to speak.
On Sept. 1, ADA announced the results of an independent review, which concluded the five attendees were removed because their actions violated the conference’s code of conduct, not because of the nature of the material they were distributing.
Five researchers at Norway’s national gender incongruence clinic are appealing a university committee’s finding they committed “gross negligence” and scientific misconduct after the group published several studies using the medical records of more than 1,000 minors without patient consent.
Two of the articles set out to count how many minors were referred to the clinic, characterize the mental health burden of trans patients and document their treatment trajectories and detransition rates. In June, a joint committee of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital (OUS) ruled five of the coauthors committed scientific misconduct for using the patients’ medical records without ethics approval or patient consent. The researchers maintain the work was for quality assurance, which in Norway doesn’t require consent. The committee ruled the work was research.
Two other articles violated research ethics standards in a “reprehensible” way, the committee found, but did not constitute misconduct. Those papers describe the outcomes of chest wall contouring and genital surgery.
Taylor & Francis is investigating an article in one of its journals after the editors published an editorial about academic freedom that contains multiple fake references and citation errors.
In May, Anastasia Christou and Steve Lambert, coeditors of Journal of Further and Higher Education (JFHE), published an opinion piece about attacks on academic freedom and social justice research. The journal’s deputy editor Rosalind Latiner Raby also coauthored the editorial.
Of 31 references in the editorial, at least nine are nonexistent articles or contain incorrect journals or inaccurate author names. The problematic references include real scholars linked to articles they didn’t write and real journal titles associated with the wrong authors. The article also has numerous citation errors in the text. Fake references can be a sign of artificial intelligence use since large language models, such as ChatGPT, are known to hallucinate references.
A psychology journal has retracted a seminal 2002 paper on deadlines and procrastination coauthored by behavioral scientist Dan Ariely of Duke University just days after a team of sleuths published analyses of the original study data, finding it had been tampered with.
The posts, which appeared Aug. 31 and Sept. 2 on the Data Colada blog, dug into the datasets behind the two main experiments in Ariely’s paper, published 24 years ago in Psychological Science. The reanalysis was prompted by a study published July 15 in the same journal attempting to replicate one of the paper’s original experiments.
The Sept. 2 retraction notice cited all three works, noting the replication study “raised questions about the underlying data in the original study,” and the Data Colada posts “called into question the veracity of the overall findings.” Ariely’s coauthor on the paper, Klaus Wertenbroch, of INSEAD in France, requested the retraction on July 23, Psychological Science editor-in-chief Simine Vazire told Retraction Watch.
The authors of a June 2025 paper in Nature estimated the contribution of atmospheric evaporative demand on the severity of droughts worldwide, as shown in this figure from the article. The journal retracted the article on Sept. 2. S.H. Gebrechorkos et al./Nature 2025
Nature has retracted a paper on the atmosphere’s role in the severity of droughts around the world after the authors discovered they made a coding error that skewed their measurements. The authors say they’ve already written a revised version of the paper.
The article, published in June 2025, found an increase in “atmospheric thirst,” or atmospheric evaporative demand — a measure of how much water the atmosphere draws from rivers, lakes, soil and so on — has exacerbated the severity of droughts by about 40%. The New York Times covered the work, claiming the study found atmospheric thirst “played an even bigger role than previously thought” in drought severity. The paper has been cited 337 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
But the authors discovered “a calculation error” that was “not related to our data or methodology, but a coding error,” lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos told Retraction Watch in a statement sent by the University of Oxford in England. Of the 11 authors on the paper, three, including Gebrechorkos and senior author Simon Dadson, are affiliated with the university.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu. Douwe C. van der Zee/Wikimedia Commons
A journal has retracted a paper by two Italian scientists who claimed to have found hidden structures inside of the oldest and largest of the Pyramids of Giza.
The study, published in Remote Sensing in October 2022, purportedly used synthetic aperture radar to penetrate the Pyramid of Khufu with energy pulses and process the echoes received, revealing a network of rooms, corridors and tunnels. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, as well as in a 2021 report by Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency.
The journal retracted the study on Aug. 10 after a reader “brought concerns to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding methodological issues with this article.” The editors investigated the claims and “confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article.”
Elsevier says it will begin investigating two papers coauthored by disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini “soon,” more than a year after two critics of his work formally requested the publisher retract the articles — and nearly a decade after two institutions found him guilty of misconduct for related work.
The papers, published in Biomaterialsin 2009and 2010, include descriptions of a 2008 trachea transplant in Barcelona conducted by Macchiarini — described in The Lancet that year, as well as in a five-year follow-up published in 2013. Both Lancet papers reported a successful surgery and that the patient had a “normal social and working life.” In reality, she needed stents, her lung function did not improve and she eventually had a lung removed.
The Barcelona patient survived, but at least three others who underwent Macchiarini’s synthetic trachea transplants eventually died. In 2023, a Swedish court sentenced Macchiarini to 2.5 years in prison for gross assault related to his failed transplants. So far he has accumulated 13 retractions.
Six editors and nearly 60 advisory editors of Games and Economic Behavior resigned after the journal’s publisher decided not to renew the editor-in-chief’s contract.
In late July, Elsevier told Hervé Moulin, a business professor of the University of Glasgow, his six-year tenure as editor-in-chief of the journal would end in December. Moulin told Retraction Watch he was disappointed by the news, as he had expressed a desire to continue in his role.
The journal’s six editors resigned in the weeks following, according to an August 16 email, the text of which is also posted on the website for the Game Theory Society. Games and Economic Behavior is one of the group’s two official journals. As of August 19, 58 of the 62 advisory editors had resigned as well.
