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Increasing workload may have contributed to recent retraction at nursing journal, editor says

Roger Watson was seeking answers. Last September, a paper in his journal had attracted criticism he thought he and his fellow editors at Nurse Education in Practice should have caught.

The February 2025 paper described the role of moulage, or simulated, realistic-looking wounds, in training nurses to perform endotracheal suction, a way of clearing out the lungs. One group used dummies with simulated bodily fluids, and the other group used regular dummies. An expert flagged the paper seven months after it was published: Tubes used in groups with or without moulage dummies had “significant size difference, which may have influenced the level of difficulty for participants to complete the suctioning task,” the expert wrote in an email Retraction Watch has seen.

The authors responded to the concerns at first, but then the conversation reached an impasse, the authors stopped responding, and the only choice, Watson said, was to retract the paper.

Major citation index put surgery journals on hold following Retraction Watch investigation

Clarivate’s influential Web of Science database of abstracts and citations has paused coverage of new content from a collection of surgery journals, including a top-ranked title in the field, following a Retraction Watch investigation from March.

Indexation in the database is widely seen as a key scholarly imprimatur and ensures visibility in literature searches and citation counts. If a journal is removed from Clarivate’s Master Journal List following review, it loses its impact factor and manuscript submissions may plummet.

The move came just a week after our investigation, published March 12, which found mandatory citation of reporting guidelines in the International Journal of Surgery (IJS) had inflated the impact factor of the open-access title, making it more attractive to authors and readers. The hold does not appear to be mentioned on the journal websites and we were not aware of it until now.

A prolific evolutionary biologist caught faking data decades ago notches a new retraction

A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted.
*shanecotee / iStock*

Anders Møller, an influential evolutionary biologist from Denmark, somehow survived the blow to his reputation after a high-profile retraction and a finding of scientific misconduct more than 20 years ago.

But a new retraction is once again raising the question of whether that fraud was just a blip in his impressive publication record or further proof, as some claim, that much of Møller’s work rests on a shaky foundation.

The latest paper to fall: Møller’s 2019 study in the journal Ecology and Evolution that reported a tenfold decline in the bugs splattered on his car windshield over two decades. The journal’s editors wrote in their retraction notice that the dataset contained “duplications” and “inconsistencies” that invalidate its conclusions.

Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books

Springer Nature will start issuing expressions of concern notices for books after investigating hundreds of its books for integrity-related problems in recent years.

The publishing giant has seen an uptick in the number of investigations for books. In 2022, Springer Nature carried out 124 such investigations. In 2023, that number grew to 207 in 2023 and 217 in 2024, Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity adviser with the publisher, told attendees of the World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, Canada, last month.

Springer Nature carried out 210 book-related probes last year, she added, and 81 in 2026 as of mid-April.

Publisher investigating two more papers on glyphosate safety over ghostwriting claims

Tayor & Francis is investigating two papers about the weed killer Roundup following claims the articles were ghostwritten by the company that developed the herbicide.

The review comes after an Elsevier journal last year retracted a paper about Roundup linked to court documents that revealed company employees wrote the article but were not named as coauthors. Authors of the two latest papers under scrutiny stand by their work and deny any ghostwriting occurred.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is highly contentious, with critics arguing the substance is carcinogenic and supporters contending the chemical is safe. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing whether states can hold companies liable for failing to include cancer warnings on products containing the substance.

Science flags paper that found AI chatbots help debunk conspiracy theories

Science has issued an expression of concern for a highly publicized study looking into whether conversations with AI chatbots could convince conspiracy theorists to abandon their beliefs. The move came after the authors of the paper found inconsistencies in their dataset, but a reanalysis shows the findings still stand, they say.

The September 2024 article found conversing with an AI chatbot called DebunkBot reduced people’s belief in a particular conspiracy theory by an average of 20%. The research was featured in news stories in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic.

This February, the authors — Thomas Costello of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University in New York and cognitive scientist David Rand at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, for the work. It has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Journal retracts depression treatment study with findings called ‘too good to be true’

In the fall of 2024, Matt Williams was grading papers at Massey University in New Zealand when he noticed something off in a study one of his students had cited.

The study, published in 2016, reported overwhelming evidence suggesting that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is an effective treatment for depression. But the roughly 85% drop in symptoms of depression linked to the therapy struck Williams as implausible.

“That’s way too big to have that kind of effect,” Williams recalled thinking as his first impression of the study. “Because I love to procrastinate instead of continuing marking, I then looked up the paper and started reading it.”

Editors of semantics journal resign, launch new journal after publisher ‘ultimatum’

The new journal, *Semantics of Natural Languages*, launched in May.

The editors of a semantics journal owned by Springer Nature have resigned to launch a new one, citing pressure from the company to increase their annual publication volume by 25%.

The editor-in-chief and the two associate editors Natural Language Semantics resigned from the journal in early April, editor-in-chief Amy Rose Deal, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Retraction Watch. They resigned in consultation with the 25-member editorial board, which gave “a very high level of support for the move,” Deal said.

In a May 19 open letter, the three resigning editors and the founding co-editors of Natural Language Semantics announced the launch of their new journal, Semantics of Natural Languages. The new journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities, an open-access publisher whose goal “is to liberate university research from commercial control,” according to its website.

Journal retracts study linking hepatitis vaccine to autism that was included in CDC review

A toxicology journal has retracted a 16-year-old study linking hepatitis B vaccines to autism in children following an independent statistical review that found a half-dozen concerns with the study’s methodology.

Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, the authors claimed boys vaccinated in their first month of life had “threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis” than those vaccinated later or not at all.

The study was included in a rapid systematic review of hep B vaccine studies presented by John Su, director of the Immunization Safety Office for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the Sept. 18 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It resurfaced in a presentation at the Dec. 4 ACIP meeting, just before the committee’s decision to no longer recommend that infants receive the hep B vaccine at birth if the mother tests negative for the virus.

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.

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