A researcher who retracted two papers last year following a years-long investigation has lost another, this one two decades old.
The same journal also corrected two papers for image duplication within days of the retraction.
The moves followed comments about image similarities on PubPeer. The retraction marks the third for biochemist Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Two of his papers were retracted in 2024, a process that took six years and included a four-year investigation by the university.
The organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has issued misconduct findings against 26 researchers for violations ranging from breach of confidentiality to image manipulation, plagiarism, and buying and selling authorship.
The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, released the results of 15 misconduct investigations on April 11. Several of the investigations involved teams of researchers and many included specific published papers, 53 in total. China has been taking steps to crack down on academic fraud, calling last year for a review of all retracted articles in English- and Chinese-language journals.
Penalties for the researchers ranged from bans on applying for funding or serving as a reviewer, to having research funding revoked — which includes having to return funds already dispersed. In most cases, the restrictions on applying for funding were for three to seven years.
A paper that made the rounds last year for its blatantly “irrelevant” citations has now been retracted.
Elsevier’s International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published “Origin of the distinct site occupations of H atom in hcp Ti and Zr/Hf” in November 2024.
Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” One of the authors told us they included the references as a “joke” after reviewers pressured them.
All 13 of the references include Sergei Trukhanov as an author, and all but one also includes Alex Trukhanov.
A former cancer specialist sanctioned for “recklessly falsifying data” admitted during an investigation interview that he periodically altered images, documents obtained by Retraction Watch show. He also stated “he may have inadequately or improperly labeled and organized” image files, increasing the chances the images were confused or misidentified.
Alan Lichtenstein, previously a staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and faculty member at UCLA, engaged in research misconduct, according to a November 2024 notice in the Federal Register. Documents we obtained through a public records request revealed his admissions, made during an inquiry that preceded the misconduct ruling.
The documents also reveal a relatively swift process: The initial inquiry by a joint UCLA-VA GLA committee took from June to August 2023 to determine a full investigation should follow. The investigation committee, formally tasked in October of that year, finished its assessment in March 2024. The inquiry committee looked at 18 allegations across 12 papers, and the investigation considered 31 allegations in 13 papers.
When it comes to conversations about vaccines and autism, we always have plenty to write about. And the latest news that the Trump administration has tapped David Geier for a study on possible links between immunizations and autism, first reported by the Washington Post, is no exception.
Geier has a long history of promoting the debunked claim of a link between vaccines and autism, STAT and others report. He has published on the topic as recently as 2020. A December 2020 paper lists his affiliation as the Institute of Chronic Illnesses, an organization he founded with his father Mark Geier, court documents say. In 2011, the Maryland State Board of Physicians disciplined Geier for practicing medicine without a license. He’s currently listed in the HHS employee directory as a senior data analyst, the Post reports.
Geier’s first appearance in Retraction Watch was in 2017, when Science and Engineering Ethics, a Springer Nature title, retracted a paper on how conflicts of interest might influence research on the link between vaccines and autism. That paper has been cited 13 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
A genetics researcher came across an interesting paper earlier this year on the gene he studies. The scientist, a doctoral candidate who asked not to be named, decided to take a closer look at which part of the gene, SNHG14, the authors targeted to measure its expression. He ran the sequence of the short strand of DNA, called a primer, given in the paper through a database and found the sequence matched with a completely different gene.
The scientist searched through similar papers and found 19 more across as many journals with the same problem: all their “SNHG14” primers matched with the gene MALAT1/TALAM1. There may be more, but he stopped looking.
A former Baylor College of Medicine researcher has been debarred from federal funding for two years after a review by the Office of Research Integrity found evidence of misconduct.
Liping Zhang, a former assistant professor in the school’s nephrology section, “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) funds,” according to a notice scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on March 19.
ORI based its findings on a Baylor College of Medicine investigation as well as evidence gathered during its oversight review, the notice states. It continues:
A chemist at a university in Pakistan found a surprise when he opened an alert from ResearchGate on a newly published paper on a topic related to his own work.
When Muhammad Kashif, a chemist at Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, looked at the paper, he noticed “substantial overlap” with an unpublished review article he had submitted to other journals. On closer inspection, he found it was indeed his paper — published by other authors.
“I was shocked and deeply concerned,” Kashif told Retraction Watch. “My unpublished work was replicated without attribution, undermining months of effort.”
Seven years after investigations uncovered “serious noncompliance” in the collection of biological samples at a California VA hospital, the original whistleblowers say several papers related to the work use these problematic samples and should be retracted. But the principal investigator of the work says there’s no reason to question the findings.
The VA San Diego Health Care System was one of 12 institutions involved in the InTeam Consortium, a research initiative between 2013 and 2019 focused on alcohol-related liver inflammation. In 2016, two whistleblowers — Mario Chojkier and Martina Buck — alleged staff at the VA hadn’t obtained proper consent to perform biopsies on critically ill patients and use the samples for research related to the project.
Subsequent investigations — including one by VA San Diego’s institutional review board — have confirmed violations of policies, primarily related to a lack of informed consent. Ramon Bataller, the principal investigator of the InTeam Consortium, told local media outlet inewsource in 2019 the samples collected at the VA would be “banished” from any academic papers.
A gibberish phrase that caught the attention of science sleuths after it slipped into several journals might trace its origin to a typo in Farsi rather than questionable use of AI, as we reported earlier this month.
Nearly two dozen scientific papers, including some in journals from major publishers, mysteriously refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope.” As we wrote in our previous story, sleuth Alexander Magazinov speculated on PubPeer “the phrase could have originated through faulty digital processing of a two-column article from 1959 in which the word ‘vegetative’ appeared in the left column directly opposite ‘electron microscopy’ in the right.”
Most of the articles containing the strange wording included authors from Iran. Magazinov told us perhaps an AI model had picked up the phrase from the 1959 article and spit it back into machine-generated text that was later plagiarized in other papers by the same Iranian network of fraudsters.
