by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

World Bank report ‘removed for review’ of nonexistent references after Retraction Watch inquiry

A World Bank report on obesity trends with at least 14 fake references in the text has been removed from the website and is being reviewed by the organization following a Retraction Watch inquiry.

The report, “Nourishing Tomorrow: Addressing Obesity Through Food Systems in South Asia,” was published in March 2025 in the World Bank Group’s Open Knowledge Repository. The document describes an analysis of how different food systems contribute to rising rates of obesity in South Asian countries. Three of its four authors are employees of the World Bank.

Muhammad Azam first came across the report in a WhatsApp group for sports science research in Pakistan, he told us. Azam, of the Government College University Lahore, has studied the prevalence of sports science research published in predatory journals in that country. So when a group member shared that some publications Azam knew to be suspect had been cited in the report, he took a closer look and found several “problematic entries,” he told us.

ORI has released just two misconduct findings this year

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has been relatively quiet in 2025, releasing just two misconduct findings with only two weeks remaining in the year — the fewest the office has released since at least 2006. ORI typically releases an average of about 10 findings a year.

The office, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, oversees research integrity and misconduct for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other HHS agencies. Its team of scientist-investigators review institutional inquiries and investigate possible research misconduct for a portfolio of publicly funded biomedical research that totals tens of billions of dollars.

In response to questions on whether the office expects to release more rulings this year, an HHS spokesperson told us the office can’t comment on open cases or anticipated findings. “ORI’s Division of Investigative Oversight continues to carry out its oversight responsibilities, and staff actively engage in process improvements to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of responding to research misconduct allegations,” the spokesperson said.

Dana-Farber settles suit alleging image manipulation for $15 million

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has settled a lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act, admitting researchers used images and data that were “misrepresented and/or duplicated” in support of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health. Dana-Farber agreed to pay $15 million to settle the claim.

Sleuth Sholto David filed the claim in April 2024, about three months after he first posted about the allegations, which played a key role in Dana-Farber’s decision to retract or correct dozens of studies. Authors of some of those papers were among senior leaders of the institution, including president and CEO Laurie Glimcher.

As is typical in such cases, the complaint remained sealed while the Department of Justice investigated. As part of the agreement, David will receive $2.63 million, or 17.5 percent of the settlement.

Exclusive: In reversal, former vice chancellor in Pakistan who was let off hook for plagiarism faces sanctions

Three years after he was let off the hook by a government commission, a former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions for plagiarizing a student thesis in a paper from 2020, Retraction Watch has learned.

Muhammad Suleman Tahir, previously of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, is now professor and chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Gujrat. According to a report issued on November 20 by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Islamabad, Tahir and his coauthors have been barred from supervising graduate students for three years and also have received a warning for their offense.

Meanwhile, the University of Gujrat removed Tahir from his position as director of the institution’s Advanced Study & Research Board on December 3, according to a notification we obtained.

How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint

A screenshot of Yousaf’s Google Scholar profile before it was removed.

Muhammad Zain Yousaf, a postdoc at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, became a scholar of note overnight. Or so it would seem, based on his now-defunct Google Scholar profile: From a modest 47 in 2022 and around 100 in 2023, Yousaf’s citations jumped to 629 in 2024. His h-index, a measure combining publication and citation numbers, took off accordingly, reaching levels typical of a senior academic.

But another researcher smelled a rat and took a closer look at Yousaf’s publications. In just two days, Yousaf had uploaded 10 short documents to TechRxiv, a preprint server hosted by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, or IEEE. Each of the documents was chock-full of self-citations. In five cases, Yousaf was an author on all 37 papers in the reference list; the rest of the time, his publications made up nearly two-thirds of the reference list.

“Many of these documents appear to be low quality, as evidenced by their lack of coherence and technical quality,” the concerned researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, said of the preprints in an email to TechRxiv last December.

Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court

*Credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)*

A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted eight years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed the herbicide, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.

The safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is hotly debated and currently under review at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, in 2015 declared glyphosate “possibly carcinogenic.”

The now-retracted article appeared in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, an Elsevier title, in 2000. Gary Williams, then a pathologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla, Robert Kroes, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and Ian C. Munro, a toxicologist at Cantox Health Sciences International in Ontario, Canada, were listed as the authors. The paper has been cited 614 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.

The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian public educational institutions.”

Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”

After realizing a fungus contaminated their experiments, researchers retract and redo study

Late blight in potatoes
*Source (CC BY 4.0)*

A team of researchers in Belgium got more than they expected when they tried to study potato pathogens: an unwelcome contaminant, a retraction, and a new paper the authors say is “an improvement over the first.”

In a now-retracted paper in Metallomics originally published in January 2024, researchers at the University of Liège described how availability of nitrogen and iron changes how the bacterium responsible for potato common scab interacts with each of the two microorganisms responsible for early and late blight while infecting the same host. The results suggested the bacterium had antimicrobial properties against both microbes, with nearly all of the experiments focusing on the fungus that causes late blight.

After publication, the authors realized their strain of the late blight-causing microorganism was not the one described in the paper. While the lab originally received the correct strain, “the plates became contaminated, and the fungal contaminant eventually overgrew the strain we intended to study,” Sébastien Rigali, corresponding author and professor at the University of Liège, told Retraction Watch.

Exclusive: ‘Highly problematic’ policy has Saudi university pressuring faculty to cite its research

At Prince Sultan University in Saudi Arabia, faculty members must help raise their school’s academic standing not by doing impactful work, but by citing the institution’s research in their papers, according to a document Retraction Watch has obtained.

In an interoffice memo from 2022, Ahmed Yamani, president of the Riyadh-based institution, referred to “the rule of the requirement of citing 3-4 relevant publications in each paper” whose aim was “increasing the exposure of PSU research work and increasing the total number of PSU citations.”

Coordinated citation efforts can boost the rankings of institutions and individual researchers. The Committee on Publication Ethics considers citation manipulation unethical.

COVID-19 paper by scientists at Harvard, Duke gets expression of concern for ‘unreliable’ data

A Science journal has issued an expression of concern over questions about the data in a paper reporting the discovery of an antibody that neutralized all COVID-19 variants in mice.

The article appeared in Science Immunology in August 2022 and has been cited 36 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study lists 30 coauthors from Boston Children’s Hospital and Duke University. An article by Boston Children’s published at the time said the findings could “contribute to new vaccine strategies.”

According to the expression of concern, published November 21, the authors informed the journal of “potential data reliability concerns” with two of the figures. The journal is in the process of determining an “appropriate course of action,” the notice continues.

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