by subject – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

University email addresses no longer effective bulwark against fake peer review

To guard against identity theft, academic publishers have been using institutional email addresses to verify authors and reviewers are who they say they are. Now, however, findings appearing in a preprint last month on arXiv.org suggest bad actors have found a way to breach this defense – and are routinely doing so.

From a pool of thousands of reviewer profiles set up as part of AI conferences in 2024 and 2025, staff at the nonprofit OpenReview, a platform connecting authors with reviewers, found 94 profiles involving fake identities. In all but two cases, the impostors had used “round-trip-verified” email addresses belonging to the domains of “reputed” universities, the authors write. (The remaining two used “.edu” domains of defunct institutions.)

Impersonating someone else using an institutional email address “adds another layer of challenge in the detection” of bad actors, said first author Nihar B. Shah of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who also sits on OpenReview’s board.

Exclusive: Publisher investigating DNA contamination paper that authors say CDC vaccine committee will consider

The publisher Taylor & Francis is investigating concerns raised on PubPeer about a paper claiming to find DNA contamination in COVID-19 vaccines beyond regulators’ recommended amounts.

The move comes as the U.S. body tasked with making recommendations for vaccine use is scheduled to consider the safety of COVID-19 shots, and two of the study’s authors say their findings will be discussed.

The paper at issue was published September 6 in the journal Autoimmunity, a Taylor & Francis title. Scientific sleuth Kevin Patrick soon posted concerns on PubPeer, which he forwarded to the ethics department of the publisher.

University vice chancellor’s work crawling with ‘tortured phrases’

The chief executive of a university in Eastern India whose research is full of tortured phrases – possible signs of plagiarism – had two papers pulled in December after investigations found evidence of “compromised” peer review and other red flags in the publications.

A third article by the executive, Amiya Kumar Rath, has also come under scrutiny, a publisher told us.

Rath became vice chancellor of Biju Patnaik University of Technology in Rourkela in 2023. A computer scientist with more than 100 publications, he is listed as the second author of one of the now-withdrawn works, a 2020 review article on inspecting and grading fruits using machine learning.

‘Article broker’ in China trying to hook journal editors with fishy publishing deals

Earlier this year, China’s supreme court said companies selling fake or low-quality research papers should be punished. But shady middlemen there continue to offer questionable deals to journal editors across the globe in a bid to secure publications for their customers, emails obtained by Retraction Watch suggest.

In the emails, sent between May and August and using the same boilerplate language, the Nanjing-based agency A-Techo said it would pay an “expedited processing fee” of $500 to $1,000 US “per accepted manuscript to support the review process.”

According to its website, the company provides various types of publication support. Signatures in the correspondence we obtained listed different names of purported assistant editors, who said they were “writing on behalf of an academic institution that supports Ph.D. researchers and faculty in publishing high-quality research.”

Papers continue to face retractions for failure to license pricy tool

Two journals have retracted papers this year for unauthorized use of a controversial scale whose creator has been known to license use of the questionnaire for six-figure sums – and to aggressively pursue those payments from researchers he claims have misused the instrument without prior approval.

The Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) is named for its creator, Donald Morisky, now a professor emeritus in community health at UCLA. As the name implies, the measure allows researchers to assess patients’ adherence to drug regimens.

Morisky made a business out of licensing the scale and demanding steep fees for researchers who failed to obtain the proper permissions, as we reported in Science in 2017. Researchers who cannot afford the payments Morisky and his business associate demand have been forced to retract their work.

Embattled journal Cureus halts peer reviewer suggestions

The mega-journal Cureus is eliminating author suggestions for peer reviewers, a prompt that is standard practice at some journals when submitting a manuscript.

According to an email sent August 25 to current and past peer reviewers, the move is “due to the potential conflict of interest” that comes from authors suggesting reviewers who may be mentors and colleagues.

Reviewers recommended by authors are more likely to give positive feedback on papers. And such recommendations gave way to such practices as peer review rings and self-peer review, vulnerabilities that started to thrive more than a decade ago.

Top education researcher goes to court over plagiarism claims, university review

A prominent education researcher in Australia is demanding compensation from a critic whose claims of plagiarism triggered the university to look into his work. Although the resulting examination of work by John Hattie, director of an education research institute at the University of Melbourne, ended without a finding of misconduct, the critic, Stephen Vainker, insists Hattie’s publications are rife with data errors and insufficient attribution.

Vainker came across “strange” citations in a paper by Hattie while studying for his doctorate in education management seven years ago. At first, he found 12 sentences lifted word-for-word, he said, from the original source about workplace management without proper citation. Among them were seven instances in which words such as “people” or “individuals” were changed to education-related words, such as “students.”

Then Vainker looked through Hattie’s most popular and influential text, Visible Learning, and its sequel, as well as his doctoral thesis, finding what he claimed were hundreds of data errors and examples of plagiarism.

‘Tin Man Syndrome’ case plagiarized from hoax, sleuths say

*A comparison of the images and an overlay, provided by a sleuth.*

On April Fools’ Day 10 years ago, radiologist Matt Skalski took part in a website’s annual challenge to prank the radiology community by posting the case of a man with “ectopia cordis interna,” or “Tin Man Syndrome.” Unlike the fictitious metal character from the Wizard of Oz, Skalski’s satirical patient had a heart — in his abdomen.

Now a group of researchers say they encountered the disease in real life, in a 22-year-old patient they claim has “no significant medical history.”

The researchers based in Iraq published their “rare case report” in Medicine in July.

High school student who volunteered at NASA-sponsored lab gets retraction

An astronomical society journal has issued its first retraction in its 10-year history — for work done by a NASA researcher and a high school student. The duo set out to confirm an astrophysics law using calculations that assumed the law was true.

The journal, Research Notes of the AAS, is published by the American Astronomical Society. It is not peer-reviewed, nor is it indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science. The retraction has prompted the journal to revise its policies on reviewing work before publication.

One of the two authors on the retracted 2024 article is Jadon Lam, who at the time was a student at Pleasant Grove High School in Elk Grove, California. Lam is now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena studying astrophysics, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says

The observed and forecasted growth rate of paper mill papers outpaces corrective measures, a new study finds. *R. Richardson et al./PNAS 2025*

Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating, according to a study of problematic publishing practices and the networks that fuel them.

The study, published August 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined research fraud carried out by paper mills, brokers and predatory publishers. By producing low quality or fabricated research, selling authorship and publishing without adequate quality control and peer review, respectively, these three groups were well known to produce a large volume of fraudulent research.

“This is a great paper showing how much fraud there is in the scientific literature. The paper also looks at different methods on how to detect problematic papers, networks and editors,” Anna Abalkina, a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, said.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: