by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

Physicist in Iraq fired over publishing scam claims fake Columbia affiliation in new paper

Five months after he was fired by ministerial order, an Iraqi professor of physics at the center of a massive publishing scam submitted a manuscript to a Wiley chemistry journal claiming affiliation with Columbia University in New York City.

The paper also stated the physicist, Oday A. Al-Owaedi, was affiliated with the University of Babylon in Hilla, Iraq, although he was permanently dismissed from his position last year.

As we reported at the time, Al-Owaedi defrauded “researchers by collecting money from them under the pretext of publishing their papers in reputable international journals as promised, while in fact falsifying and forging publication in fake websites,” according to a ministerial order we obtained.

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.

Court dismisses biochemist’s lawsuit against MD Anderson

A Texas court has dismissed a lawsuit by a biochemist accused of research misconduct who claimed her former institution violated her due process rights during its investigation.

Sonia Melo sued The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2025, alleging the institution failed to follow its policies during a misconduct investigation into her work. MD Anderson found in May 2024 Melo had engaged in research misconduct while a postdoctoral fellow between 2012 and 2014, according to court documents.

Attorneys for MD Anderson requested a judge dismiss the suit in February, arguing the institution is a governmental entity entitled to sovereign immunity that protects it from lawsuits seeking money. Under Texas law, public hospitals are shielded from most suits by immunity rules. Some loopholes for medical negligence exist, such as when medical equipment harms patients.

Journal retracts paper criticizing parental alienation theory after group threatens to sue

A humanities journal has retracted an article about the controversial theory of parental alienation after receiving legal threats from a group that supports the concept.

On May 19, the Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities (IJRAH) removed a review article by Robert Keith Head suggesting the theory of parental alienation is unsupported by research and fails “to meet basic validity requirements for psychological constructs.”

The move came after the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG) — which describes itself as an international, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the study and understanding of parental alienation — accused the journal of publishing “scientific fraud” and demanded the journal retract the paper or face legal action. The journal said the removal was not dictated by “external demands or threats” but followed a “comprehensive secondary evaluation” by its editorial board and independent psychometric experts who identified “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.”

A researcher’s unusually high h-index gives a window into an expansive citation network

With an h-index of 75, computer scientist Thippa Reddy Gadekallu ranks among the world’s most highly cited researchers. But the speed and means of his ascent to those lofty heights of scholarship has been as remarkable as the achievement itself.

In less than a decade, Gadekallu, a professor at Zhejiang A&F University in China, has managed to bootstrap himself from scientific obscurity by collaborating with colleagues around the world who cite each other’s work in ways that have raised questions. In some years, Gadekallu received more citations than Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and the top-rated computer scientist on Google Scholar.

Earlier work uncovered a network of reviewers on papers Gadekallu edited who frequently suggested adding citations to his work. A closer look by Retraction Watch shows the impact of that strategy on Gadekallu’s h-index, and reveals additional possible collaborators in the network.

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.

Widely criticized keto diet study retracted

A 2025 paper claiming the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques has been retracted after widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims. The journal found “the identified errors are too great to be corrected with a corrigendum,” according to the March 11 retraction notice.

In April 2025, JACC: Advances published the study, which looked at plaque build-up in 100 otherwise generally healthy people who had experienced an increase in their cholesterol levels while being on a keto diet. The study claimed scans performed one year apart by the company Cleerly showed the diet was not associated with the development of arterial plaques.

This finding went against what previous studies had found, and it led to what Wired called “a new war in the nutrition world.”

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.

Feud between physicists ends in defamation verdict

A prolonged feud between two physicists in Italy that has played out for years in journal letters and blog posts has resulted in a defamation award for one of the rivals.

Lorenzo Iorio and Ignazio Ciufolini have sparred for more than 20 years over claims of plagiarism, sock puppetry and defamation. After two criminal lawsuits against Iorio failed, Ciufolini took the spat to civil court where the Court of Rieti on April 15 ordered Iorio to pay Ciufolini €15,000 (roughly US$17,500) for defaming Ciufolini in blogs and online journals.

In her eight-page decision, Honorary Judge Francesca Tosi said the statements Iorio made about Ciufolini, which date back to 2011, were more than “mere criticism” justifying a difference of opinion.

‘Comically bad’ datasets used to train clinical models for stroke and diabetes

A dataset on Kaggle purportedly showing people who have had a stroke includes images of Sylvester Stallone from *Rambo* and other celebrities. *Source*

Scrolling through an online image dataset, Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, pointed out a few familiar faces. Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, and then again on the red carpet. “This is just ridiculous,” Barnett said. George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig all appear more than once, often with the same image. “You can see,” Barnett said, “this is just a comically bad dataset.”

This particular dataset, collected in a folder titled “droopy” and hosted on an open-source repository called Kaggle, underpins a paper published in Scientific Reports – not as a find-the-celebrity game, but as a training set for a predictive clinical model for early detection of strokes.

The paper is the most recent example of a much wider problem that Barnett and his Ph.D. student Alexander Gibson have documented with Kaggle, which is owned by Google and hosts datasets uploaded by users that researchers and machine learning practitioners can use to build predictive models. By examining two other Kaggle datasets on stroke and diabetes, both of which included tabular patient data, Gibson and Barnett traced how the data move through the scientific literature and in some cases, into clinical use. Their work, described in a preprint posted to medRxiv in February, already has led to several retractions of the papers using these dubious datasets.

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