by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

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.).

‘I asked him to stop’: Father adds daughter’s name to over 100 preprints without her permission

An author in China with nearly 500 preprints has continued to add his daughter’s name to papers – despite her insistence she was not involved.

Shifa Liu, whose papers list affiliations with Peking University in China, has posted 499 works (and counting) on topics in physics and mathematics. His daughter, an undergraduate at an American university, is listed as a coauthor on over 100 of those preprints. In some cases, she was even named as the corresponding author. (Retraction Watch is not naming the daughter to respect her privacy and will not be accepting comments that name her.)

The daughter told Retraction Watch she “did not participate in the research, writing, or submission of any of these papers,” adding her father included her name “without my knowledge or consent.”

Major pharmacology journals flag another 15 papers by scientist facing criminal probe

A leading pharmacologist in Italy accused of embezzling research funds is now the subject of coordinated editorial action by one of the field’s professional societies.

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics announced expressions of concern for 12 papers, corrections for two and a retraction in an editorial published April 3 in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and Molecular Pharmacology. Salvatore Cuzzocrea, a pharmacology professor at the University of Messina, was a coauthor or corresponding author on all the papers. As we reported previously, Cuzzocrea is being investigated in Italy for allegedly embezzling more than 2 million euros in research reimbursements and allegedly rigging university contracts.

Since our reporting on Cuzzocrea a year ago, journals have retracted five more of his papers. One, from BMC Neuroscience, was retracted 10 days after our reporting for containing data that appeared in an earlier publication. A different paper was retracted last year from Biology for containing overlapping images, another from Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy for image overlaps, and the International Journal of Molecular Science retracted two more this year for containing duplications and “inappropriate editing” of micrographs.

10 years ago, Elisabeth Bik published a preprint heard around the world

If you are at all familiar with scientific sleuthing, you’re familiar with Elisabeth Bik. She is quoted so often in the mainstream media it is probably difficult to imagine a time before her supersense for spotting similarities in images wasn’t making headlines.

But it was 10 years ago, on April 19, 2016, when she made her debut, when we covered her work screening more than 20,000 biomedical research papers containing western blots. She and coauthors Ferric Fang – a member of the board of directors of our parent nonprofit organization, The Center for Scientific Integrity, and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – and Arturo Casadevall, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, posted the work as a preprint on bioRxiv.org and it appeared two months later in mBio.

The preprint was a shot across the bow for journals and publishers, and in the decade since, Bik has advised and mentored others doing similar work. In 2024, she won the Einstein Foundation Award for “identifying misconduct and potential fraud in scientific publications, highlighting science’s problems policing itself.” She donated the proceeds to The Center for Scientific Integrity to create a fund to help other sleuths do their work.

Bik spoke with us earlier this month about the paper, sleuthing and more. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

“Game-changer” breast cancer study retracted as Indiana researcher out of his post

A group of cancer researchers whose work has been questioned by sleuths has been hit with their third retraction in less than a year.

Today, Science Translational Medicine (STM) withdrew a 2021 breast cancer study by former Indiana University researcher Yujing Li and 12 other authors for image falsification. The immunotherapy study had been described by senior author Xiongbin Lu as a “game-changer” for triple negative breast cancer in a 2021 IU press release.

The paper’s April 15 retraction notice states that a joint research misconduct investigation involving Indiana University, The Ohio State University, and the University of Maryland, College Park determined “falsification occurred during creation of figure S9C.” The institutions alerted the American Association for the Advancement of Science of the misconduct late last year and requested the paper’s retraction, according to Meagan Phelan, a spokesperson for AAAS, which publishes STM.

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 in 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.)

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