corrections – Retraction Watch

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.

Correction to a retraction highlights tortured phrases have been around longer than LLMs

Corrections to retractions have also been around longer than AI tools like the one that created this image. *DALL-E*

While large language models are taking the blame for hallucinations, punctuation and all manner of language choices these days, turns of phrase were being tortured well before the arrival of LLMs.

Overlooking that fact seems to have led to a recent correction to a retraction – yes, you read that right – in Sage’s Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology. The original article, published in February 2022, was on detecting coronary artery plaques. It contained several known tortured phrases, synonyms and rephrasings — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors.

For instance, the paper used the term “cardiovascular breakdown” for “heart failure”; “outward appearance acknowledgement” instead of “face recognition”; and “attractive resonance” for “magnetic resonance.”

Corrections, biases, and humility in science: Q&A with Tuan V. Nguyen

In a new memoir, Kangaroo Dreams, Tuan V. Nguyen, D.Sc., Ph.D., provides a unique perspective on medical research. Nguyen escaped Vietnam in 1981 as part of the mass “boat people” exodus of refugees, taking to dangerous waters just a few months after his older brother attempted the same and disappeared. Making his way to Australia through grit and luck in 1982, Nguyen started his new life as a dishwasher before steadily building a career in science, ultimately specializing in bone research.

Nguyen is now distinguished professor of predictive medicine and director of the Center for Health Technologies at the University of Technology Sydney and adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of New South Wales. He’s also a Leadership Fellow of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and a member of the Order of Australia. Dedicated to the memory of his lost brother, Kangaroo Dreams weaves Nguyen’s personal journey with a thoughtful examination of contemporary medical research. We interviewed him in writing to learn more. (Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Retraction Watch: You were co-author on a 1994 Nature paper subsequently corrected in 1997 which reported individuals with a particular vitamin D receptor gene benefitted from relatively high bone mineral density. When the research team made this finding, you write, “A nagging unease, however, bothered me. The results, while undeniably impressive, seemed almost too good to be true.” The team published the findings only to discover – after a Nature reader challenged the results – that a lab member who was ill likely contaminated samples, skewing the results. Did you regret not having pushed harder on your initial doubts? What held you back?

Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

A Cell Press journal quietly removed part of a funding statement from a paper related to gender-affirming hormone therapy that the authors say was included in error. Experts called the move “worrying.”

The authors of the paper, which appeared in Cell Reports on September 23, gave estrogen therapy to male monkeys to better understand how hormone therapies used in gender clinics might affect the immune system.

The research drew attention from several conservative news organizations, some of which called the project “disturbing” and alleged the work cost millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding.

‘No misconduct here’: Author defends addendum that sleuth says is ‘inadequate’

A 23-year-old paper has received an addendum for “possible inadvertent errors” in the figures. But a sleuth says the update doesn’t address issues with the work.

The 2002 paper, which describes the behavior of Langerhans cells in normal and inflamed skin, was published in Nature Immunology and has been cited 774 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The article received a correction in 2003 to replace two “incorrect” figures. Over 20 years later, PubPeer commenter “Archasia belfragei” flagged issues with different figures, noting in December that some PCR bands were “more similar than expected.”

Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction

The authors of a paper that went viral with attention-grabbing headlines urging people to throw out their black plastic kitchen tools have corrected the work for a second time.

But a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

The paper, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” originally appeared in Chemosphere in September. The study authors, from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, looked for the presence of flame retardants in certain household plastic items, including toys, food service trays and kitchen utensils.

Science issues correction on a paper after repeat experiments and misconduct finding

Science has changed an expression of concern on a 2022 paper to an erratum after removing one of the coauthors — who was found to have committed misconduct — and allowing the researchers to repeat experiments.

The paper, “Structural basis for strychnine activation of human bitter taste receptor TAS2R46,” has been cited 68 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Two months after publishing the article in September 2022, Science issued an editorial expression of concern, stating a post-publication analysis had found one figure with “potential discrepancies.”

Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board

Wiley has issued a mass correction at one of its journals after finding nearly 100 papers with undisclosed conflicts of interest related to submissions by board members and relationships between authors and journal editors.

An investigation found conflict of interest issues in 98 papers published from 2020 to 2025 in Geological Journal, although the issues may have gone on before then, sleuths suggest. Nearly a third of the papers shared a single co-author — an associate editor at the journal.

That editor’s contract was not renewed, we have learned.

According to the correction notice, issued in early May, the journal had not taken “measures to manage potential conflicts of interest between authors and editors” for 98 articles.

Who you calling ‘bignose’? Shark paper corrected after species mix-up

Bignose shark
*NWFblogs/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)*

A case of mistaken identity among sharks has led to a correction that changed, among other content, an article’s title, its abstract and the discussion section.

The paper, published in February 2024 in Environmental Biology of Fishes, was originally titled “Expanded vertical niche for two species of pelagic sharks: depth range extension for the dusky shark Carcharhinus obscurus and novel twilight zone occurrence by the silky shark Carcharhinus falciformi.”

But after re-examining the data, the authors concluded: “the dusky shark from the published paper was misidentified, and instead, it is most likely a bignose shark,” according to an October 2024 correction to the article.

‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers

Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns.

An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure out the problem. A month later, when Aquarius, a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, revisited the paper, the figure had been replaced without any note that the publisher had fixed the issue.

Aquarius once again took to PubPeer to express his concerns. “I don’t see any notification when looking at the landing site for the paper: no erratum, corrigendum or a simple log-entry that something has been changed,” he wrote, noting that he had informed Elsevier, the journal’s publisher about the issue. In July, the journal issued a corrigendum for the paper.

“I was quite a bit upset about it,” Aquarius told Retraction Watch. “It takes away one of the key elements for any reader to be critical, namely that you know what has happened.”

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