by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

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.

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.

Elsevier journal retracts 100+ papers for authorship issues, editor conflicts of interest

Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) has retracted 165 papers this year, most for “suspicious” changes in authorship or editorial conflicts of interest.

The retractions have come after STOTEN was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November after the index put it on hold due to concerns about article quality. The journal published over 10,000 articles in 2024; so far this year it has published fewer than 1,000.

The retractions, most of which were issued in August, applied to articles published from 2018 to 2025. At least 50 of the papers were handled by associate editors who had “an ongoing collaboration on a co-publication” or “an extensive record of collaboration” with the authors of the articles, according to the notices.

Paper mill studies get cited by clinical guidelines, policy docs and more, analysis finds

Studies produced by a suspected paper mill are frequently cited in patents, clinical guidelines and policy documents, according to a new analysis.

The work, posted on arXiv on August 31, examined the fate of nearly 2,000 academic papers with one common factor: At least one coauthor lists the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network (PNN) as an institutional affiliation.

But there’s one problem: the PNN is not a real network of scientists. Instead, it’s an authorship-for-sale scheme, as Retraction Watch reported in 2022.

Lawsuit over retraction of abortion pill papers heads toward arbitration decision

A legal challenge by authors over three retracted articles about mifepristone is set for an arbitration conference this month as nationwide debate over the abortion pill heats up at the appellate level.

Ten researchers sued Sage in 2024 after the publisher retracted three of their papers about the purported dangers of mifepristone, a medication that ends early pregnancy. The authors alleged the company “applied inconsistent retraction standards” to their work based on Sage’s perception of their “pro-life affiliations,” in violation of California’s anti-discrimination law, according to their complaint.

The authors asked the Superior Court of California, County of Ventura to compel Sage into arbitration, as required by publishing agreements the researchers signed with the company. Arbitration is an alternative pathway for resolving disputes in which an arbitrator hears the parties’ arguments and issues a decision outside of the traditional court process.

CEO of AI company loses paper on cognitive impact of generative AI

A psychology journal has retracted a paper on how using generative AI can affect confidence in work tasks after its sole author refused to share data with the editors.

The April paper, published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA), purported to describe the results of a survey of 1,923 adults recruited online to perform AI-assisted tasks. The paper was featured in an APA press release and articles in TIME and Futurism.

As we wrote in June, experts in the field began flagging issues with the paper’s data on PubPeer shortly after it was published. Sandra Grinschgl, who studies human-technology interaction at the University of Bern in Switzerland, was the first to do so, and later enlisted the help of colleagues Ian Hussey and Malte Elson. Their concerns included inconsistencies in graphs and results, study design, “erroneous” references and a lack of ethics approval.

University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent

New York University Press is pulling all copies of a book about intelligent design after the author falsely quoted another scholar in the work.

Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, by C.W. Howell, was published by NYU Press in 2025. Earlier this month, the publisher said it was “pulling the current edition from the market” and “destroying all existing inventory” after learning Howell attributed an inaccurate quote to Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, according to an Aug. 3 email Retraction Watch has seen.

The misquote stemmed from a passage in a court ruling Howell “mistakenly” read as a direct quote from Behe and attributed as such, he told us. Howell writes about the intersection of faith and science, and serves as an academic director for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication

The Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University in Japan is defending Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka against claims of image manipulation in multiple studies on which he was an author. The institute says questioning Yamanaka’s integrity without sufficient evidence is “completely unacceptable.”

Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 and works at CiRA.

On August 7, Gotham City Research LLC, a short-selling firm based in the United States, released a report alleging image manipulation in several papers by Yamanaka appearing between 2000 and 2020.

Guest post: The uncomfortable truth an explosion of papers reveals about authors’ access to data

The involvement of independent academic researchers in examining data and conducting analyses is central to producing trustworthy research. Because of this, many journals require authors to sign a statement acknowledging they “had full access to all the data in the study,” and take “responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.” Indeed, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations for authorship note that authors should be “accountable for all aspects of the work.”

A rapidly increasing number of published articles rely on analyses produced via the TriNetX platform. However, TriNetX users don’t get full access to the information in the platform, muddying the truthfulness of any analyses of the data and compromising the integrity statements offered by authors and accepted by journals.

Instead, users see aggregate counts, descriptive statistics and estimated quantities, such as hazard ratios, without ever interacting with line-level data. And because the underlying data are constantly changing as new records are added, analyses run on the platform are often irreproducible, even by the researchers who originally conducted them.

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