by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

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.

Defamation suit demanding Elsevier retract paper heads closer to trial

A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge.

Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS’ needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled “massive” financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” under its “own standards,” but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air.

The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has “plausibly alleged actual malice” by Elsevier defined as “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.” Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler’s recommendation in July 2025.

Ceramics journal pulls dozens of papers flagged for integrity concerns

A materials science journal has pulled 56 papers so far this year for transgressions including image overlap, concerns about data integrity and “suspicious” changes in authorship.

Ceramics International began retracting the papers in July. More than 50 of the retractions were requested by an “impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics advisor,” according to the notices.

Most of the retraction notices – 43 – reference PubPeer comments calling out issues with the work. In emails we have seen, scientific sleuth Mu Yang flagged 80 papers from Ceramics International to the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, on April 23, 2025.

Princeton student says she did not conduct the experiments described in her now-retracted paper

A figure from the now-retracted paper in *Macromolecular Materials and Engineering* shows the “hypothesized effects” of the experiments described in the study.

Earlier this week, Retraction Watch reported on a Princeton student’s decision to retract her own paper from an engineering journal due to “significant methodological errors.” The student, Rishika Porandla, now tells us she never conducted the experiments described in the study.

“The beam experiment described in the paper was a proposed experimental workflow with associated calculated results,” she wrote in an email. “Public confusion led me to recognize and regret that this is not clear in the retracted publication, and I have included detailed clarification in an updated retraction statement to Wiley.”

Porandla’s original article, published in 2024 in Macromolecular Materials and Engineering based on work she did while in high school, claimed to show it was possible to enhance the biodegradation of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, by mixing it with gold nanoparticles and blasting it with an electron beam.

Decade-long fraud by market survey firm a ‘gut punch’ for researchers

In April 2025, David Victorson, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, was polishing several manuscripts for submission when a colleague sent him a link to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. “Eight Defendants Indicted in International Conspiracy to Bill $10 Million for Fraudulent Market Survey Data,” the headline read.

Victorson couldn’t believe it. Op4G, a market research company he first worked with more than a decade earlier, was being indicted for selling bogus data between 2014 and 2023. In fact, Victorson had just used them to run an online survey related to meditation as part of a U.S. National Institutes of Health project to create a standardized mindfulness metric. He didn’t yet know whether his own data were compromised, but he knew there was no way he’d be submitting his manuscripts with those data.

“Because they were within the period of the indictment, we scrapped them entirely,” Victorson said. “It took years off our lives.”

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