by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

*Figure from correspondence to* The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today.

The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828. The researchers, led by Maxim Topaz of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, used AI to “distinguish genuine fabrications from formatting discrepancies such as informally abbreviated titles.”

Topaz’s group located the sharpest increase in hallucinated references in mid-2024, which they note coincided with the rise of AI writing tools. The findings come as Nature reported last month that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 “might include invalid references generated by AI.” Retraction Watch has seen its fair share of reports of hallucinated citations generated by LLMs like ChatGPT.

Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed

In August 2021, several news outlets in Russia reported a cancer breakthrough: Researchers at the chemistry and biophysics institutes affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences had developed a new kind of nanoparticle that could help detect breast cancer in an MRI and kill tumor cells at the same time. State-run media and several Russian science outlets reported on the study over the next few days.

But four years later, Journal of Materials Chemistry B, the journal that had published the paper, retracted it.

The publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry, found the paper contained repeating patterns in the electron microscopy data and several images depicting cells that were identical to those included in a later paper with a number of the same authors. The authors — who include Vladimir Ivanov, director of Russia’s Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, and Alexander Baranchikov, also at the institute — all agreed to the retraction.

Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms

A science competition for middle and high school students in Vietnam is embroiled in controversy as its winners head to next week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair – widely considered the most prestigious event of its kind. Allegations include cheating and plagiarizing.

Observers in Vietnam noticed the suspect work appears to be especially advanced to have been conducted by two high school students, one of whom is studying mathematics and the other geography. Under the rules of the Vietnam Science and Engineering Fair (ViSEF), the project – titled “Development of multifunctional fire-resistant, heat-insulating, and antimicrobial polyurethane composite materials for application in construction and daily life” – had to have been completed in 12 months while the two student-authors also continued their school work.

Sleuths in a Vietnamese scientific integrity group have found multiple overlaps between the students’ poster and research published in RSC Advances in February 2025. A graph in the students’ poster is almost identical to one in the published paper, according to sleuth Van Tu Duong, although it is plotted in a different color and thickness (see the comparison above). This observation has led to allegations that the students had access to the researchers’ raw data.

Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books

A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.

Carla Rossi, scientific director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi in Verona, Italy, must repay the funding due to extensive plagiarism discovered in the texts, according to the decision by the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, released in January. Rossi also is barred from applying for grant funding from the foundation for five years, according to the ruling. Rossi is founder and director of Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats in Barcelona and also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (RECEPTIO) in Switzerland, which operates an academic press that has published Rossi’s works.

The Swiss body issued the funding ban in 2024 and ordered Rossi to repay grants for a total of three books after finding a pattern of plagiarism and lack of transparency during the grant application process, according to a summary in the court decision. Rossi took the foundation to court over the findings, arguing it reviewed incorrect versions of her books and suggesting other versions circulating on the Internet were altered or manipulated by third parties.

ORI announces 15-year debarment against former Rice University scientist

The U.S Office of Research Integrity has formally announced a 15-year funding debarment against a former Rice University scientist for research misconduct, resolving allegations that arose 17 years ago.

Chemist Ariel Fernández intentionally fabricated data in 12 grant-supported papers, four unpublished manuscripts, one presentation and three grant applications while a professor at Rice University in Houston, according to a notice posted May 1 on ORI’s website and to be published in the Federal Register on May 5. As part of the sanctions, Fernández is barred from receiving federal research funds for 15 years. The announcement is the third finding this year from ORI.

The notice follows a decision nearly a year ago by administrative law judge (ALJ) Margaret G. Brakebusch upholding ORI’s findings and recommended debarment, issued in 2022, after an appeal by Fernández. We reported on that ALJ decision after it was made public in February of this year. An exclusion record posted the same day our story ran shows Fernández’s debarment started on March 25. (We reached out to ORI about the case on March 5.)

NEJM retracts case study for AI-manipulated imagery

An “Images in Clinical Medicine” item in the *New England Journal of Medicine* has been retracted after the authors acknowledged using AI to alter the photo. *Y. Wang, X. Mu/© The New England Journal of Medicine (2026)*.

The New England Journal of Medicine has retracted a clinical image with a picture the authors admit was manipulated with artificial intelligence.

The short piece, published April 18, reported the case of an 87-year-old man with lung damage after being exposed to a forest fire. The report included a startling image of black “casts” taken from the man’s airways, the size of which can be gauged by a tape measure at the top of the picture.

The dramatic visual drew attention in the media (and one news outlet has already noted the retraction at the time of this writing). But the authors, Yuling Wang and Xiangdong Mu, of Daxing Teaching Hospital and Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, respectively, acknowledged having used AI to superimpose the tape ruler in the figure.

Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study

Despite concerns some have raised about potentially compromised data, AI chatbots aren’t yet completing online research surveys widely, according to a new preprint.

The authors of the study, posted earlier this month on PsyArXiv, found that fewer than 1% of around 4,800 survey responses collected by 12 different companies contained text that was likely not written by a human. Among 400 responses from a 13th company, however, around 16% were flagged for possibly being completed by a chatbot.

The study used a novel detection tool created by the survey research company Prolific, which funded the project.

Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

The market for fake authorship on a research paper has prices to match every budget, according to a new dataset compiled from thousands of advertisements on social media platforms and paper mill websites.

The dataset, called BuyTheBy, is the first systematic attempt to understand the market for paper mill products, according to its creators. It compiles more than 18,000 text-based advertisements from seven paper mills operating across India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, collected at various points between March 2020 to April 2026. The researchers found prices vary widely depending on geography, ranging from $56 to $5,631 for a first author slot, according to a preprint submitted to arXiv.

Several of the advertisements appear to correspond with published papers subsequently published in the targeted journals, with identical titles to those advertised. But cracking down on the industry with datasets such as these will be difficult, some experts say, especially as the business model evolves rapidly with AI.

Journal goes dark after impersonating Eric Topol and others

Within hours of researchers from prestigious institutions discovering they were listed as authors on a fabricated paper, the website for the journal and publisher has been taken down.

Cardiologist Eric Topol, the executive vice president of Scripps Research, posted on X yesterday that his name appeared on a “fraudulent” paper published in the so-called Journal of Digital Health Implementation. He suspected the article, dated March 29 and titled “Implementation Science for AI Integration in Digital Health Systems,” was AI-generated.

“If there ever was an AI-generated paper, this one would qualify as a high probability of being so,” Topol, who is also founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Retraction Watch.

A response to: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

Editor’s note: We recently published a guest post on universities’ responsibility for investigating misconduct allegations related to work by staff and students conducted and/or published while they were at other institutions. The article prompted a vigorous discussion in the comment thread. Below is a letter to the editor from Itamar Ashkenazi and Howard Browman, both members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Council.

Simon Kolstoe questions whether it is a university’s responsibility to act when concerns are raised about possible publication misconduct by their staff or students in situations where the misconduct relates to work conducted at other organizations.

We contend that it is their responsibility, regardless of where the work was conducted. That is because research and scholarly activity, while supported by universities, is conducted by people. It is the people who engaged in the misconduct who must be held accountable. That cannot happen without the participation of the institutions with which they had (and have) a formal relationship (as students, employees, contractors, etc.).

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