by reason for retraction – Page 2

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Chemist Ariel Fernández intentionally fabricated data in 12 grant-supported papers, four unpublished manuscripts, one presentation and three grant applications while a professor at Rice University in Houston, according to a notice posted May 1 on ORI’s website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An “Images in Clinical Medicine” item in the *New England Journal of Medicine* has been retracted after the authors acknowledged using AI to alter the photo.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.).

‘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.

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