by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so

Unverifiable researchers are a harbinger of paper mill activity. While journals have clues to identifying fake personas — lack of professional affiliation, no profile on ORCID or strings of random numbers in email addresses, to name a few — there isn’t a standard template for doing so.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers (STM) has taken a stab at developing a framework for journals and institutions to validate researcher identity, with its Research Identity Verification Framework, released in March. The proposal suggests identifying “good” and “bad” actors based on what validated information they can provide, using passport validation when all else fails, and creating a common language in publishing circles to address authorship.

But how this will be implemented and standardized remains to be seen. We spoke with Hylke Koers, the chief information officer for STM and one of the architects of the proposal. The questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes

One of several retraction notices noting “the existence and nature” of a company couldn’t be confirmed.

Since March of last year, Elsevier has pulled around 60 papers connected to companies in the Caucasus region that don’t seem to exist. The retraction notices attribute the decision to suspicious changes in authorship and the authors being unable to verify the existence of their employers. Online sleuths have also flagged potentially manipulated citations among the articles.

Each of the retracted papers appears to follow an identical pattern, based on the details given in the retraction notices. First, a solo author submits a paper and claims to be affiliated with a company that doesn’t appear in any business registries. During the revision process, the author adds several other authors to the paper — including new first and corresponding authors, despite no clear contribution to the original work. This behavior is typical of paper mills and authorship-for-sale schemes.

When asked by the editors, the original authors are unable to explain why they added the additional authors, nor validate the “nature” or “existence” of the companies they were claiming an affiliation with, according to the retraction notices.

Web of Science delists bioengineering journal in wake of paper mill cleanup

Bioengineered has lost its spot in Clarivate’s Web of Science index, as of its April update. The journal has been working to overcome a flood of paper mill activity, but sleuths have questioned why hundreds of papers with potentially manipulated images have still not been retracted.

A spokesperson for Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal, said it has taken action against the paper mill; the journal has retracted 86 papers since January 2022. They are “disappointed” at the delisting decision, the spokesperson said. The journal now faces up to a two-year embargo before it can rejoin the citation index.

Bioengineered publishes bioengineering and biotechnology research. In 2021, journal editors launched an investigation when submissions spiked and several authors of submitted and accepted articles asked for authorship changes – both hallmarks of paper mill activity.

Biochemist with previous image duplication retractions loses another paper

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.

Chinese funding agency sanctions 26 researchers in latest misconduct report

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 ‘joke’: Paper with ‘completely irrelevant’ citations retracted

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.

Former VA physician admitted to altering images and deleting data, documents show

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.

Why RFK Jr.’s pick for a vaccine-autism review may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers

David Geier and his father Mark speak to Fox News in 2022.

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.

Sequence errors are ‘canaries in a coal mine’ in genetics studies, sleuth says

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.

Two of the papers he found have been retracted. One appeared in 2023 in Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, a journal Wiley acquired from Hindawi that is no longer publishing. The notice cites inappropriate citations and peer review manipulation. The other article, published in 2022 in the International Journal of Oncology, was retracted for plagiarism.

Kidney researcher debarred from federal U.S. funding for image manipulation

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:

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