by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

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.”

Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination

Raghabendra Kumar Mahato

A preprint server has withdrawn three papers by an author at the center of a Retraction Watch story revealing a prolific research factory operated through the WhatsApp messaging system.

Last week, we reported on Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student in Nepal, who runs an international research network that churns out conference abstracts and journal papers at a rapid-fire pace. Mahato’s network includes nearly 1,000 members connected through WhatsApp and produces suspected fast-churn science, while recruiting authorship for the works. Papers by the network have been accepted by major journals and presented at conferences by leading medical societies.

On July 24, Research Square, a preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts by Mahato due to concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network,” according to notices placed on the work. The notices include a link to Retraction Watch’s investigation.

Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement

Images from the now-deleted dataset on Kaggle purportedly showed people who had a stroke, but the folder included stock images and photos of politicians and celebrities, as seen in this screenshot.

The online data repository Kaggle has removed a problematic dataset for violating intellectual property rights months after it was flagged by sleuths for containing celebrity photos and lacking information on data provenance or confirmed medical diagnoses.

Researchers had used the images to train machine learning algorithms to detect stroke, but the dataset instead contained images of people with Bell’s palsy — as well as pictures of celebrities from movies and on the red carpet, as we reported in May. Adrian Barnett, a medical statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, flagged the dataset after discovering two others he and his colleagues investigated in a February preprint that showed signs of being fabricated.

Using a reverse image search, Barnett matched four of the photos in the dataset, called “Facial droop and facial paralysis image,” to a paper published years earlier in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA). Only after prompting the journal to complain to Kaggle did the company take down the dataset.

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday

In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.

But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.

Journal retracts breast cancer paper 10 years after sleuth flagged issues

A biomedical journal has retracted a paper by a cancer researcher who sued her former institution over misconduct allegations. The action comes a decade after a sleuth first raised concerns about the article.

Former Ohio State researcher Flavia Pichiorri criticized how the publication, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, handled the dispute and said the journal suddenly pivoted away from its plan to republish the study with repeated experiments, a claim supported by correspondence seen by Retraction Watch.

In 2020, Ohio State University found Pichiorri, who worked in the lab of Carlo Croce, culpable for manipulating and reusing images in four publications, spanning from her time in Croce’s lab through establishing her own lab at Ohio State. Croce was cleared of direct misconduct, but OSU found serious management and oversight failures in his laboratory. Once a high-profile cancer researcher at Ohio State, Croce now has 18 retractions. He has filed several defamation lawsuits unsuccessfully, and reportedly owes his attorneys more than $1 million.

Harvard cancer researchers earn retraction for image duplication

A group of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have lost a paper for image duplication following an investigation by the two institutions.

The paper, published in September 2019 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, described a treatment for tumors caused by a disorder called tuberous sclerosis complex. Several of the article’s 12 authors are affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine division. Corresponding author David Kwiatkowski is an oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

The research was partially funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and a National Institutes of Health grant, the latter of which was awarded to Kwiatkowski.

ORI sanction and news coverage prompts sleuthing, retraction

Four months after the Office of Research Integrity sanctioned a former postdoc for falsifying images in grant reports, a Science journal is retracting a paper by the researcher for image duplication.

After reading our story about the ORI’s findings, sleuth Paul S. Brookes took a look at the researcher’s ORCID profile and ran his papers through an AI tool that spots duplicate images.

Brookes’ analysis showed a 2019 paper in Science Signaling contained an image identical to an earlier study in Scientific Reports with the same first author — Chen-Yeh Ke, the former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York who was sanctioned by ORI in March for falsifying images in an unpublished manuscript supported by federal funds and reporting the fabricated results in two research performance progress reports.

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