by subject – Retraction Watch

Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’

A judge has dismissed a legal challenge aimed at forcing Elsevier to retract a long-criticized study that concluded the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens.

The 2001 paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), has faced scrutiny for more than 20 years by critics who say the study has led to unwarranted and potentially harmful prescribing of the drug to youth. As we reported last October, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper shortly after a lawsuit was filed by attorney George W. Murgatroyd III against the journal’s owner, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and Elsevier, which publishes the title.

In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Murgatroyd claimed the journal is violating the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by continuing to “publish, distribute, and sell a fraudulent scientific article that contains material facts” that mislead the public and endanger adolescent mental health and safety. AACAP and Elsevier are profiting from the article by charging readers to buy access to the paper, according to the complaint.

Why don’t journalists circle back to cover retractions? A conversation with Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Documentation, a team of researchers in journalism, social science and data explore how and why journalists report – or don’t report – on scientific retractions.

The investigators performed an analysis on news coverage of “high-attention retracted articles” identified from the Retraction Watch database and other sources and also interviewed journalists from the U.K. and Finland to gain a cross-cultural perspective.

The lead author of the paper, Malgorzata Iwaniec-Thompson, of the University of Sheffield’s School of Information, Journalism and Communication, took questions from us about the work.

Publisher to retract entire conference proceedings, ban editor who wrote most of them

*EPJ Web of Conferences* will retract the entire volume of conference proceedings for ICEMR 2025.

On Monday, we published a story about a physicist in India who had three papers on superheavy elements retracted after others in his field began flagging his work. Hours later, a publisher decided to retract an entire volume of conference proceedings after one of the critics pointed out the researcher, H.C. Manjunatha, was responsible for the majority of its contents.

Manjunatha is listed as coordinator of the International Conference on Emerging Frontiers in Material Science and Radiation Physics, which took place in December. Manjunatha was one of four editors for the conference’s proceedings published in EPJ Web of Conferences on March 18. Of the 55 articles in the volume, Manjunatha is an author on 32.

David Boilley, a physicist at the University of Caen Normandy and researcher at GANIL, emailed EDP Sciences, which publishes EPJ Web of Conferences, on March 22 noting Manjunatha’s position as editor and the large number of papers he authored in the volume. Boilley, whom we interviewed for our story, mentioned the forthcoming article to the journal and also included a copy of his recent preprint calling out Manjunatha’s papers.

Physicists flag over 50 papers on superheavy elements, leading to 3 retractions

A physicist in India has accumulated three retractions and 13 expressions of concern for papers on superheavy elements after three researchers in the field began to flag issues with his work.

H.C. Manjunatha, the common author on the articles, is with the physics department at the Government First Grade College in Devanahall, according to his most recent papers, including eight published this year.

The three retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s The European Physical Journal A in 2017. According to the retraction notices, a post-publication review found “serious flaws in the research methodology, numerical results, and interpretation of findings.” All pertain to the discovery and synthesis of superheavy elements, which are unstable elements with large numbers of protons.

Most editors at math journal resign over multiple reviews, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ removal of EIC

Nearly two dozen editors of a mathematics journal have resigned after its publisher removed the top editor and implemented a multiple review system, “running roughshod over the standard practices of the refereeing process in mathematics.”

Of the 31 members of the Communications in Algebra editorial board, 23 signed a March 10 resignation letter sent to Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal. In the letter, the editors said the publisher “unilaterally” implemented a system in which more than one reviewer would be expected to look over a paper.

The peer review process in mathematics is more labor-intensive than for other topics, the editors said, including “not only an assessment of the impact and significance of the results but also a line-by-line painstaking check for correctness of the results. This process is often quite time-consuming and makes referees a valuable commodity.” The letter continues: “Doubling the number of expected reviews will quickly either deplete the pool of willing reviewers or vastly dilute the quality of their reviews, and both of these are unacceptable outcomes.”

University of Melbourne opens formal investigation into education researcher John Hattie

The University of Melbourne has opened a formal investigation into the prominent Australia-based education researcher John Hattie, backtracking on a decision months ago that concerns about his work didn’t warrant further scrutiny.

The investigation, confirmed in a letter seen by Retraction Watch, was triggered by allegations made by Stephen Vainker, a teacher and former doctoral researcher in the United Kingdom, who documented what he says are hundreds of instances of plagiarism and data errors across Hattie’s body of work. The investigation also follows our coverage last August.

Vainker also discovered what seems to be a hallucinated reference in one of Hattie’s recent writings, prompting a book publisher to remove it from the work.

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines

A preprint server has withdrawn a study that suggested children vaccinated in the second month of life are more likely to die soon after when compared to those who did not receive the vaccinations.

The paper, posted at Preprints.org last December, was written by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker of Children’s Health Defense, a New Jersey-based nonprofit organization founded by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The group is known for anti-vaccination advocacy.

Jablonowski and Hooker conducted their analysis using a dataset provided by the Louisiana Department of Health. It included 1,775 children who died before turning 3 years old between 2013 and 2024 and had a record of being vaccinated. The preprint suggested children who received six recommended vaccinations in the second month of life were more likely to die in their third month compared to those who had not received the vaccinations.

Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

A screenshot of Louis’ LinkedIn profile before we reached out to him.

Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on our leaderboard.

The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses.

Louis – who also goes by Louis Hitler Muzong – did not respond to Retraction Watch’s requests for comment. Until recently, his LinkedIn page named him as a Ph.D. student in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, with an expected completion date of October 2027. But retraction notices for two papers say Louis requested his Leeds affiliation be removed. One states “the research described in the article is not associated with that institution,” and the other that the affiliation “was given incorrectly.” The University of Leeds did not respond to a request to verify whether he was a student there.

Journal retracts GLP-1 study after researcher questions central finding

After reading a recent study about GLP-1 treatment in the International Journal of Obesity, David B. Allison immediately became skeptical about the paper’s analysis. The article, published in May 2024, found people who combined a GLP-1 therapy with another weight loss drug lost more weight than patients on a GLP-1 therapy alone.

“I could not really comprehend exactly what analysis they did,” Allison, chief of nutrition and director of the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told Retraction Watch. “And more so, I could not comprehend how the analysis they did would give results that would be informative of the conclusions they drew. So I was scratching my head a little bit.”

The IJO paper was a retrospective cohort study of adults with obesity who had been prescribed a GLP-1 therapy, specifically Saxenda and Ozempic. The study compared patients who received a GLP-1 alone with those receiving the GLP-1 therapy and then had bupropion/naltrexone added to their regimen. The Food and Drug Administration approved bupropion/naltrexone in 2014 for chronic weight management in obese adults.

As journal’s retraction count nears 170, it enhances vetting

A journal is implementing tighter controls for guest editors and peer reviewers after an investigation led to the retraction of more than 160 articles.

As we reported last month, the American Society For Testing And Materials (ASTM) International started an investigation into its Journal of Testing and Evaluation after an ASTM vendor noticed some “irregular patterns in the peer review” of a special issue. The investigation revealed the peer review process in four special sections or issues had been compromised, resulting in the retraction of 147 articles.

The journal has since pulled 19 more papers, this time from a special section on human-centered artificial intelligence published in 2021.

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