by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?

*Mark Barnes (courtesy of Ropes and Gray LLC)*

In an editorial published today in Science, Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes call for greater transparency in investigations of scientific misconduct with an aim toward making sure prospective academic employers know of applicants’ past misdeeds. As we’ve reported, in the absence of transparency around findings of misconduct, some universities have discovered too late they hired someone who has turned out to be a serial offender.

Lauer, who served as Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health from 2015-2025, and Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions, propose a tracking system similar to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). That database logs adverse actions and malpractice payments as a way to inform decisions about individual physicians by hospitals. As Lauer and Barnes note, federal law “requires a hospital to query the NPDB whenever it is considering a new applicant for medical privileges, as well as to conduct repeat queries every 2 years to make sure information on staff is up to date.” We asked Barnes to elaborate on the ideas presented in the op-ed. (He notes he is speaking only for himself here.)

Retraction Watch: You write in your op-ed universities may avoid sharing personal information — presumably including results of misconduct investigations — for fear of legal claims of defamation or violations of privacy. Are those fears valid?

A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’

As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors naming her as the correction notice.

The sleuth calls it “ethical editorial malpractice.” The publisher says it was an “administrative error.” After Retraction Watch reached out for comment, the journal removed the text of the email from the correction notice.

The paper, on trends in chronic kidney disease in people with lupus, appeared in BMC Nephrology in August.

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data

Markus Englund, a software developer and sleuth based in the Netherlands, first hit paydirt with invasive plant species in China. After having scanned 12 other published scientific datasets with his novel detection software with no results, he came across one showing something suspicious: rows and rows of measurements of plant roots repeated across entirely different species.

“I was really excited,” he said in a recent call with Retraction Watch. “I couldn’t think of any innocent explanation for why that would be the case.”

Englund had built a tool dedicated to “purging” fabricated data by identifying “impossible” data in spreadsheets available on open repositories, according to Science Detective, his site about the initiative. From his initial review, he has found 18 datasets containing duplicated values that are possibly serious enough to need correcting — including one from an influential paper on Parkinson’s disease, as The Transmitter recently reported. (Retraction Watch’s cofounder Ivan Oransky is that publication’s editor-in-chief.)

Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

I am a research ethicist and often get asked by my university to investigate when potential concerns are raised about our staff or students. One example involved the recent case of the alleged paper mill and self-citation activities by Hitler Louis and Innocent Benjamin. The matter raised significant questions about who within the research community has the responsibility to act when concerns like this are raised.

Regular readers of Retraction Watch know that detecting alleged research misconduct is a haphazard affair. Frequently a university will find out about concerns after being notified by research integrity sleuths writing under pseudonyms. In this case, “Cisticola Tinniens” informed us that one of our current MSc students (Benjamin) had an unusually high number of publications for his early career stage, with some highlighted on the PubPeer website as potentially problematic.

The first thing we did was to check to see whether our university was named in any of these papers, as clearly institutions do have a responsibility for research attributed to our researchers or students. We found only one of the suspect papers named us directly, and since the work definitely had not occurred at our institution, it was relatively easy to get this affiliation corrected almost immediately.

Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage

In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.

In February, Evgenios Agathokleous, an environmental resources researcher at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology in China, asked Prime Scholars’ European Journal of Experimental Biology to retract a 2023 article that listed him as the sole author. In his email to the journal, he said he had never seen the paper and asked the journal to remove it and publish a formal retraction notice.

Two days later, a Prime Scholars representative named Nina responded, telling Agathokleous “your article has already been successfully published in our journal in accordance with the company’s publication norms and policies.” Nina then asked Agathokleous to pay 519 euros, the equivalent of roughly $600, which they said “covers the costs associated with publication handling, indexing preparation, and database maintenance.”

BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’

The BMJ has retracted a paper on stem cell therapy for heart failure after sleuths flagged the work for “serious” inconsistencies in data.

Published in October, the paper reported the results of a phase III clinical trial of more than 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, looking at whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack. The journal announced the results in a press release, and news of the findings appeared in several outlets. New Scientist called the study the “strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself.”

A week after the study was published, sleuths took to PubPeer to point out inconsistencies between the data reported in the article and the dataset uploaded with it. The concerns included a “curious repeating pattern” of records in the dataset and a high number of integers for the height and weight of patients.

Jury to decide whether Duke retaliated against researcher who reported sexual harassment

A jury will soon decide whether leaders at Duke University accused a researcher of misconduct in retaliation for her reporting sexual harassment at the institution.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick Auld ruled Brahmajothi Mulugu provided enough evidence to show the timing of Duke’s misconduct investigation against her may have been retaliatory, allowing Mulugu’s legal challenge to proceed. In his Jan. 16 decision, Auld denied a motion by Duke to end the lawsuit, concluding a jury should weigh whether Mulugu’s sexual harassment report fueled the university’s misconduct actions against the scientist.

Mulugu, an immunologist in Duke’s Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, sued the university in 2023, alleging leaders conducted an “unjustified” research misconduct investigation after she reported sexual harassment by then-professor Mohamed Bahie Abou-Donia. The university’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) substantiated Mulugu’s harassment report in November 2020, and Abou-Donia resigned, according to a case summary in Auld’s decision.

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?

A few months ago, when Elle O’Brien, a data scientist at the University of Michigan, was checking who had recently cited her work on Google Scholar, she came across something that would take her and her colleagues down “a rabbit hole.”

When O’Brien opened a publication that had recently cited her, it appeared to be a rewritten version of an arXiv preprint she had co-authored with two colleagues, Grischa Liebel and Sebastian Baltes. Yet this did not seem to be a simple case of theft by other academics.

For starters, the six authors listed on the fake article didn’t exist, although three had been given the same institutional affiliations as O’Brien, Liebel, and Baltes: the University of Michigan, Reykjavik University and Heidelberg University, respectively. The similarities in the texts read as if someone had typed, “ChatGPT, please rephrase this paper without changing anything else,” Liebel wrote in a post on LinkedIn. But why would fake authors need publications?

Judge upholds 15-year debarment against scientist who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch

An appeals judge has recommended the U.S. Health and Human Services uphold a proposed 15-year debarment for a scientist accused of research misconduct more than a decade ago.

In a May 2025 decision, administrative law judge (ALJ) Margaret G. Brakebusch concluded that “undisputed facts” establish Ariel Fernández engaged in research misconduct by falsifying research results in published papers, grant applications and other materials while serving as a professor at Rice University in Houston. Brakebusch recommended HHS affirm the proposed sanctions made by the Office of Research Integrity in a 2022 charging letter — including a 15-year ban from federal funding for Fernández, an Argentine chemist.

The development is the latest in a lengthy saga involving skepticism over Fernández’s work dating back to 2009. Over the years, scientists have criticized his work, journals have investigated his papers, and Fernández has flip-flopped about the funding sources for some of his articles. Fernández also levied a legal threat against Retraction Watch in the past for reporting on an expression of concern in one of his papers.

The Lancet retracts half-century-old unsigned commentary on talc for undisclosed industry ties

The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products.

The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defense attorneys to claim scientific proof of talc products’ safety, according to critics. But one such attorney says the paper “would not be relied upon to any significant degree.”

Published in 1977, the article argued against government-mandated regulatory testing for asbestos in cosmetic talc. Around that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering such monitoring, a task that ultimately became the responsibility of cosmetics companies.

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