by publisher – Page 2 – Retraction Watch

‘Hot mess’ paper questioning CO2 and climate change gets retracted

The paper refers to air temperature data as “obtained by NASA from satellites” and claims the main areas of warming depicted in this figure do “not fit in with the main industrial centers in the world!”
*S.A. Harris/Atmosphere 2023*

A paper that called into question many central data linking carbon dioxide to the rapidly warming climate has been retracted for “significant concerns,” including “unsupported conclusions” and “inaccuracies” in the interpretation of the data.

The paper, published in August 2023 in the MDPI journal Atmosphere, was written by Stuart Harris, a former geography professor at the University of Calgary. It has 26,000 views and was mentioned 869 times on the social media platform X, according to Altmetric. It was also covered by the climate skeptic website The Daily Sceptic. The article was cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

“It is a hot mess,” Marcus Sarofim, a climate scientist at Johns Hopkins University, told Retraction Watch. “I certainly don’t think this paper has any business being in the peer-reviewed literature.” He also pointed out the paper was submitted and accepted in under a month, saying the short timeframe “is always a bad sign.”

When open data are misused

*Credit: HALUSTD from Popspixel via Canva*

When Dorothy Bishop was asked to review a paper for a small neuroscience journal in August, she could tell from the abstract the authors had used a dataset she had first published four years ago on the public repository OpenNeuro. The dataset contained raw functional MRI scans from 50 participants, taken while they completed language-related tasks such as thinking of words and matching words to pictures.

“I was curious that somebody had already analyzed it, because it’s a hefty dataset that would have taken a lot of work to analyze,” Bishop, an emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, told Retraction Watch.

She quickly found problems in the manuscript. The description of the dataset didn’t match what she and her colleagues had actually done, and several references didn’t support the claims they were cited for. “There was clearly something seriously wrong,” she said. The editor was also suspicious, Bishop said, and the paper was eventually rejected. But Bishop believed the authors would try to publish the manuscript elsewhere, so she did a broader search of their names.

Journal investigating paper on heart device with registration number for wrong trial

The publisher of a European Heart Rhythm Association journal is investigating a paper that lists the incorrect registration number for a clinical study of a widely used but controversial heart implant.

The paper, published in EP Europace in May, described a prospective study of the Watchman FLX, from Boston Scientific, for a procedure called left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) in 400 people with abnormal heart rhythms. The authors concluded the device was “feasible, safe, and resource efficient, achieving high procedural success and low complication rates.”

Cardiologists have warned of caveats with the device and the LAAO procedure itself, mainly that early studies found LAAO caused a “significantly higher rate of a primary composite endpoint that included stroke, systemic embolism, cardiovascular/unexplained death, and major bleeding.” A study earlier this year found LAAO with a Watchman device increased rates of stroke and other complications when compared to oral medications.

Wiley investigating book chapter on biodiversity for fake references

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.

Lancet union declares first-ever strike over staff wages

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.”

Diabetes association turmoil roils journal as group tries to thwart boycott

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.

Researchers appeal misconduct finding over studies of trans youth

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.

Editors of higher education journal coauthor editorial with fake references

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.

Procrastination study by Duke’s Dan Ariely retracted after sleuths find signs of data tampering

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.

Oxford researchers retract Nature paper on ‘atmospheric thirst’ for calculation errors

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.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: