by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted

*An illustration of a cell secreting exosomes. Meletios Verras/iStock*

In a February 2018 editorial, Rod Rohrich, a plastic surgeon and the former president of the World Association of Medical Editors, blasted predatory journals for “the damage that these illegitimate open access journals do to the reputation of legitimate, credible ones.”

Two years later, he wrote about how his team at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open, the journal he founded in 2013, had demonstrated to authors and readers that they had created a rigorous peer-review process and were “advancing patient safety and outcomes and elevating the science of plastic surgery globally.”

But an investigation by Retraction Watch raises questions about the way Rohrich, who is now editor emeritus at the journal, has promoted preliminary and sometimes misleading research about products to which he has financial ties. That includes exosomes, which are often derived from stem cells and have increasingly been touted — with limited evidence — for skin care, hair loss and wound healing.

Japanese institute finds materials researcher with 41 retractions guilty of ‘extensive’ manipulation

An investigation by a national research institute in Japan has concluded one of its former researchers fabricated and falsified figures in seven papers. Two publishers confirmed they are investigating the articles.

Joseph Raj Xavier, of Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in Chennai, India, has lost 10 other papers this year alone, according to the Retraction Watch Database. His total is currently 41 retractions, earning him a spot on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, found Xavier guilty of fabrication and falsification in “scanning electron microscope images, atomic force microscope images, and scanning electrochemical microscope images, among others,” according to a translation of an investigation report released September 29.

‘Springer’ agency website offering authorship for sale goes down following Retraction Watch story

A screenshot from the “Springer Journals Online” website before it went down on Friday.

The website for Springer Journals Online, an agency offering authorship slots in articles in exchange for payment, has gone offline, four days after Retraction Watch published its investigation into its activities.

As we reported on Monday, the agency was soliciting researchers offering services that included securing authorship in research articles intended for journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE, among others.

Springer Journals Online did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email asking why the website was unavailable, if it had halted operations, or if it wished to address our previous story. No one answered calls made via WhatsApp.

Paper touted by MD Anderson gets expression of concern for data ‘concerns’

A 2025 paper identified a protein (stained in brown) that plays a role in bone metastases.
*Image courtesy of Li Ma via MD Anderson*

Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern over “a series” of data concerns in a paper lauded by MD Anderson Cancer Center last year for identifying “a new driver” of bone metastasis.

The article, published in May 2025, has been the subject of a long and growing thread on PubPeer since April, where critics have been raising concerns about numerous images that appear to have been duplicated. The majority of the paper’s 22 authors are affiliated with MD Anderson in Houston, with at least two authors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

In June, the journal issued a correction to the paper, stating the authors “identified errors” during cross-checking of the original data, including incorrect and misplaced images.

Former Crick Ph.D. student loses COVID vaccine paper for fabrication

Science Translational Medicine has retracted a paper on COVID-19 vaccines after an institutional investigation revealed a former Ph.D. student fabricated data and falsified images in the article. The retraction is the former student’s second for fabrication this year.

The July 2022 article looked at whether a vaccine targeting a particular part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could help defend against a wider range of COVID-19 variants in mice. It has been cited 83 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the October 14 retraction notice, lead author Kevin Ng, formerly a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London, was responsible for fabricated data in one of the figures and falsifying images in another. Ng admitted responsibility for the fabrication during the editorial investigation, the notice states, which “casts doubt on some other experiments presented in the paper, for which primary data and samples are unavailable, precluding post hoc verification.”

Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity

In March, Thomas Harvey sat in on a talk at the American Physical Society’s summit in Denver on a new model of the universe that claimed to eliminate the need for dark matter and dark energy. William George, a fluid dynamicist who spent his career studying turbulence and an emeritus professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, gave the presentation.

“It was very rambling,” said Harvey, a postdoc working in high energy theory at MIT, “and it was very clearly wrong.”

After the talk, Harvey found George’s paper on the topic in Physics of Fluids. He decided to flag the problems he saw on PubPeer under a pseudonym, including errors in the math and misapplied principles of general relativity, and then sent a “polite email” to the editors.

“That’s where it went very wrong,” Harvey said.

A company named Springer that isn’t the publisher is offering authorship for sale

The homepage for Springer Journals Online offers to “help you craft a manuscript that passes the demanding criteria of high impact journals.”

Computer scientist Richard Fateman got an email in August that was completely “out of the blue”: an offer of coauthorship in articles headed for publication in prestigious journals, in exchange for a fraction of the publication costs.

Fateman, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, retired 18 years ago, so he was alarmed by the offer from a company called “Springer Journals Online.” He thought it was a scam or a phishing attempt to get money, he told Retraction Watch.

He replied to the email, asking “‘are you for real?’” He also talked to his colleagues at Berkeley to ask if they had ever received similar offers. “I got a response from one or two people saying they’re not entirely surprised,” Fateman said. “And, ‘isn’t it a shame that this is going on?’”

Editor-in-chief resigns amid probes of alleged citation manipulation, data errors

The editor-in-chief of The Egyptian Rheumatologist has resigned following claims of questionable citation practices and improper peer review at the journal.

At least three publishers are also investigating alleged data errors in papers in other journals by the former journal editor, Tamer Gheita, and his research group. Gheita, a professor of rheumatology at Cairo University in Giza, has denied the claims, calling the complaints “subjective” and “malicious.”

The Egyptian Society of Rheumatic Diseases (ESRd) started investigating Gheita in June following concerns about his editorial practices at the society’s journal, including unusually rapid peer-review timelines and questionable citation patterns, according to Bassel Elzorkany, interim editor-in-chief for the journal. Elzorkany told Retraction Watch the ESRd board temporarily suspended Gheita, and Gheita resigned shortly afterward.

Above and beyond: An editor wanted authors to know they’d been falsely cited

Like many college professors today, Sarah S. Richardson has seen AI-hallucinated citations in work submitted by her students. But she was surprised when an editor recently contacted her about a hallucinated citation involving her own work.

A March 31 email from the editor in chief of Disability Studies Quarterly explained Richardson was one of six scholars falsely cited in a journal article. The editor apologized for the error and alerted Richardson of the paper’s retraction.

“The editor took the extra step of informing all scholars who could have been harmed by the hallucinated citation[s] and did so in an exceptionally thoughtful and caring manner,” said Richardson, the Aramont Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. “I suspect that most hallucinated citations are never discovered, let alone redressed by a retraction and outreach to those affected.”

Tennessee researcher heads to court amid claims of theft, forgery and revenge

In May 2025, Tennessee authorities were preparing to arrest a university math professor for allegedly soliciting university donations from his students and pocketing the money.

Investigative records paint the picture of a professor who took financial and personal advantage of his students for years – from manipulating them into paying him rent to making them clean up after his dog – and grew vengeful when they spoke out about his alleged crimes.

As state investigators closed in, the professor, Don Hong, tried to get revenge against a student who reported him by accusing her of research misconduct and telling a journal to retract a study she recently authored, according to an investigative report from the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. When a grand jury indicted Hong on May 5, 2025, for theft and forgery, it tacked on a retaliation charge for his actions against the student.

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