by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

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A 2025 paper claiming the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques has been retracted after widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims.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.

Reviewer finds ‘top pharmaceutical scientist’ has a self-citation problem

Daniel Bar-Shalom, a pharmacist at the University of Copenhagen, was incensed.

He’d been asked to review a manuscript by Muhammad Imran Qadir, an associate professor at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, Pakistan. According to his institution’s website, Qadir was the “top pharmaceutical scientist” in the country. But Bar-Shalom thought the introduction to the paper felt like it could have been written by a student. The real problems started in the middle of the article, however, in what Bar-Shalom came to think of as “the fill of a shit sandwich.”

There, sprinkled throughout the text, were several irrelevant and trivial sentences. “Novel drugs and vaccines are being made or designed by scientists,” read one. “Genomics and proteomics have been longstanding tools in the creation of novel drugs,” another stated.

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.

One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

*Figure from correspondence to* The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today.

The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828. The researchers, led by Maxim Topaz of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, used AI to “distinguish genuine fabrications from formatting discrepancies such as informally abbreviated titles.”

Topaz’s group located the sharpest increase in hallucinated references in mid-2024, which they note coincided with the rise of AI writing tools. The findings come as Nature reported last month that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 “might include invalid references generated by AI.” Retraction Watch has seen its fair share of reports of hallucinated citations generated by LLMs like ChatGPT.

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.

Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms

A science competition for middle and high school students in Vietnam is embroiled in controversy as its winners head to next week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair – widely considered the most prestigious event of its kind. Allegations include cheating and plagiarizing.

Observers in Vietnam noticed the suspect work appears to be especially advanced to have been conducted by two high school students, one of whom is studying mathematics and the other geography. Under the rules of the Vietnam Science and Engineering Fair (ViSEF), the project – titled “Development of multifunctional fire-resistant, heat-insulating, and antimicrobial polyurethane composite materials for application in construction and daily life” – had to have been completed in 12 months while the two student-authors also continued their school work.

Sleuths in a Vietnamese scientific integrity group have found multiple overlaps between the students’ poster and research published in RSC Advances in February 2025. A graph in the students’ poster is almost identical to one in the published paper, according to sleuth Van Tu Duong, although it is plotted in a different color and thickness (see the comparison above). This observation has led to allegations that the students had access to the researchers’ raw data.

Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books

A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.

Carla Rossi, scientific director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi in Verona, Italy, must repay the funding due to extensive plagiarism discovered in the texts, according to the decision by the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, released in January. Rossi also is barred from applying for grant funding from the foundation for five years, according to the ruling. Rossi is founder and director of Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats in Barcelona and also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (RECEPTIO) in Switzerland, which operates an academic press that has published Rossi’s works.

The Swiss body issued the funding ban in 2024 and ordered Rossi to repay grants for a total of three books after finding a pattern of plagiarism and lack of transparency during the grant application process, according to a summary in the court decision. Rossi took the foundation to court over the findings, arguing it reviewed incorrect versions of her books and suggesting other versions circulating on the Internet were altered or manipulated by third parties.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: