by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

Judge dismisses Splenda lawsuit, says courts wrong place for research debate

A North Carolina judge has scrapped a defamation suit by the maker of Splenda against a scientist, ruling the research dispute doesn’t belong in court.

TC Heartland LLC, which manufactures the artificial sweetener, sued researcher Susan Schiffman in 2023 alleging she made defamatory remarks to the public about the product following a study she authored about sucralose. The paper, published that same year in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, found “sucralose to be genotoxic” and called for a review of its regulation. A spokesperson for Taylor & Francis, which publishes the title, told Retraction Watch the article is under investigation.

The paper does not mention “Splenda,” but TC Heartland claimed Schiffman “relentlessly” disparaged the sweetener during media interviews to “promote” the paper and warned the public it was dangerous to consume, according to the company’s lawsuit. Schiffman, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, countersued TC Heartland for defamation after the company created a webpage that challenged her research and “essentially accused her of being a publicity hound,” according to court documents.

Springer Nature un-retracts Planck papers, citing “human error”

Today the Retraction Watch list of Nobelists who have retracted papers bids Verabschiedung to Max Planck.

After days of scrutiny, Springer Nature has restored two papers by Planck, who won the Nobel for Physics in 1918, reversing a 2011 decision to retract the articles for “copyright violations.”

Both articles are back, and now carry the following statement:

Former acting director of national research lab in India adds another retraction

A cancer journal has retracted a paper by a former acting director of an institute in India, bringing her retraction total to nine.

Chitra Mandal, a former senior researcher at the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (CSIR-IIC) at Kolkata, served as acting director in 2014-15. She also headed the CSIR’s Innovation complex between 2010 and 2015. She received multiple awards, and was also appointed a Science and Engineering Research Board Distinguished Fellow in 2018.

Mandal has now lost nine articles to retraction and more than two dozen of her papers have been flagged on PubPeer, most for image irregularities or data issues in graphs. In March, Wiley’s Molecular Biology International retracted a 2011 article Mandal coauthored, also for image issues. We previously wrote about an expression of concern on a 2016 paper in which Mandal was a co-author.

The latest retraction involves a 2011 paper in Leukemia Research about the movement of lymphoblasts from the bone marrow to peripheral blood in childhood leukemia. The journal retracted the paper on May 30, citing concerns that some of the data in figures appear to have been manipulated.

Sex pay ban paper earns a retraction after a long and winding road for an unhappy author

In March 2024, Riccardo Ciacci, an economist at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain, published a paper claiming Sweden’s ban on buying sex had increased reported rapes by as much as 62%. The finding gained attention on social media, and quickly drew criticism from others in the field.

In particular, a group of three economists took their concerns to social media and to the journal editors, and eventually published a critique of Ciacci’s work. They claimed his analysis reports a statistical relationship not relevant to the finding described in the paper. They concluded there was no large or statistically significant finding.

What followed was a year-long effort to fix the paper, and then ultimately, a decision to retract it. Ciacci, who was not accused of misconduct, said the retraction, which he disagrees with, has cost him a promotion and funding for future research. He also alleges he experienced an onslaught of harassment on social media. In the end, Ciacci maintains the retraction was unjustified, and critics say it came far too late.

Physicist in Iraq fired over publishing scam claims fake Columbia affiliation in new paper

Five months after he was fired by ministerial order, an Iraqi professor of physics at the center of a massive publishing scam submitted a manuscript to a Wiley chemistry journal claiming affiliation with Columbia University in New York City.

The paper also stated the physicist, Oday A. Al-Owaedi, was affiliated with the University of Babylon in Hilla, Iraq, although he was permanently dismissed from his position last year.

As we reported at the time, Al-Owaedi defrauded “researchers by collecting money from them under the pretext of publishing their papers in reputable international journals as promised, while in fact falsifying and forging publication in fake websites,” according to a ministerial order we obtained.

Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books

Springer Nature will start issuing expressions of concern notices for books after investigating hundreds of its books for integrity-related problems in recent years.

The publishing giant has seen an uptick in the number of investigations for books. In 2022, Springer Nature carried out 124 such investigations. In 2023, that number grew to 207 in 2023 and 217 in 2024, Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity adviser with the publisher, told attendees of the World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, Canada, last month.

Springer Nature carried out 210 book-related probes last year, she added, and 81 in 2026 as of mid-April.

Court dismisses biochemist’s lawsuit against MD Anderson

A Texas court has dismissed a lawsuit by a biochemist accused of research misconduct who claimed her former institution violated her due process rights during its investigation.

Sonia Melo sued The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2025, alleging the institution failed to follow its policies during a misconduct investigation into her work. MD Anderson found in May 2024 Melo had engaged in research misconduct while a postdoctoral fellow between 2012 and 2014, according to court documents.

Attorneys for MD Anderson requested a judge dismiss the suit in February, arguing the institution is a governmental entity entitled to sovereign immunity that protects it from lawsuits seeking money. Under Texas law, public hospitals are shielded from most suits by immunity rules. Some loopholes for medical negligence exist, such as when medical equipment harms patients.

Journal retracts paper criticizing parental alienation theory after group threatens to sue

A humanities journal has retracted an article about the controversial theory of parental alienation after receiving legal threats from a group that supports the concept.

On May 19, the Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities (IJRAH) removed a review article by Robert Keith Head suggesting the theory of parental alienation is unsupported by research and fails “to meet basic validity requirements for psychological constructs.”

The move came after the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG) — which describes itself as an international, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the study and understanding of parental alienation — accused the journal of publishing “scientific fraud” and demanded the journal retract the paper or face legal action. The journal said the removal was not dictated by “external demands or threats” but followed a “comprehensive secondary evaluation” by its editorial board and independent psychometric experts who identified “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.”

A researcher’s unusually high h-index gives a window into an expansive citation network

With an h-index of 75, computer scientist Thippa Reddy Gadekallu ranks among the world’s most highly cited researchers. But the speed and means of his ascent to those lofty heights of scholarship has been as remarkable as the achievement itself.

In less than a decade, Gadekallu, a professor at Zhejiang A&F University in China, has managed to bootstrap himself from scientific obscurity by collaborating with colleagues around the world who cite each other’s work in ways that have raised questions. In some years, Gadekallu received more citations than Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and the top-rated computer scientist on Google Scholar.

Earlier work uncovered a network of reviewers on papers Gadekallu edited who frequently suggested adding citations to his work. A closer look by Retraction Watch shows the impact of that strategy on Gadekallu’s h-index, and reveals additional possible collaborators in the network.

Critics of birdsong study fight to be named in Nature’s retraction

A zebra finch in New South Wales, Australia. *Source: JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)*

Researchers who flagged methodological issues in a paper on birdsong a year and a half before Nature retracted it say they should be credited in the editorial notice. But the editors have refused, with one telling the critics the paper was retracted for unrelated reasons.

The March 2024 study at the center of the dispute looked at how sexual selection may drive song patterns in male zebra finches. Nature retracted the paper last month because two of the synthetic song pairs used in the study were found to be unreliable, according to the notice. All three authors agreed to the retraction.

Todd Roberts, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch the critics now asking for credit “prompted us to check the synthetic song pairs used in our paper.” He said his team did not do the reliability analysis of the pairs until after publication.

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