Retraction Watch

A look back at 2024 at Retraction Watch, and forward to 2025

If 2024 felt like a whirlwind, you’re not alone. It was another busy one here at Retraction Watch, too.

Some numbers to tell that story:

2024 was a record traffic year for us, with 7.5 million pageviews – a 15 percent jump from the previous record, set in 2015, thanks to a scoop some longtime readers may remember.
Here’s our top 10 list by traffic (in a thread over at Bluesky, which we joined in November).
The Retraction Watch Database – now part of Crossref – has just shy of 55,000 retraction entries, and counting.

A sampling of a few other key accomplishments this year:

Finland Publication Forum will downgrade hundreds of Frontiers and MDPI journals

A committee of scholars in Finland has decided to downgrade 271 journals from Frontiers and MDPI in their quality rating system, in a move that may discourage researchers from submitting manuscripts to the outlets.

Both publishers criticized the move, first reported in Times Higher Education, as lacking transparency and seeming to target fully open-access publishers.

Finland’s Publication Forum (JUFO) “is a rating and classification system to support the quality assessment of research output,” which factors into government funding for universities, according to its website. “The objective is to encourage Finnish scholars and researchers to publish their research outcomes in high-level domestic and foreign forums.”

Journals investigating dozens of papers by leading Canadian urologists

A high-profile Canadian urologist received an editorial expression of concern for one of his papers this month, after anonymous comments on PubPeer flagged suspected data duplication in dozens of his articles.

By our count, sleuths have flagged 30 papers co-authored by Martin Gleave, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and co-founder of the Vancouver Prostate Centre. According to the posts on PubPeer, images in these studies appear “much more similar than expected” based on analyses using the similarity detection software ImageTwin. The issues include similarities within individual papers and across multiple publications, with some comments suggesting the alleged reuse of tumor specimens.

Gleave, an appointee to the Order of Canada for his work developing treatments for prostate cancer, has received more than $120 million (approximately $84 million USD) in funding throughout his career, according to his profile on the Vancouver Prostate Centre website. He is also a co-founder of OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, with several of the findings from the flagged papers connected to the company and related patents.

Weekend reads: Shoddy commentaries flood journals; key hydroxychloroquine paper retracted; a researcher confesses

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 450. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

EcoHealth Alliance retracts and replaces paper on potential origin of COVID-19 in bats

The authors of an influential but controversial 2020 paper on the activity of bat coronaviruses in China which proposed the animals as a “likely origin” for the virus that causes COVID-19 have retracted their work and republished a revised version of the analysis. They say their results and conclusions did not change.

The paper, “Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China,” appeared Aug. 25, 2020, in Nature Communications. It has been cited 154 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and by at least two international policy documents.

The authors are affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the New York City-based nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, which has come under intense scrutiny by members of the U.S. Congress and others. The U.S. government in May suspended funding for EcoHealth amid concerns the COVID-19 pandemic virus may have developed from research on which the nonprofit and Wuhan lab collaborated – a so-called “lab leak.” EcoHealth has denied the pandemic virus could have emerged from its work.

Journal won’t retract paper that involved human organ transplants in China

The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation (JHLT) has decided against retracting a November 2024 paper that violated the ethics policy of the publication.

After publishing the paper, which describes a new mechanical circulatory support device used to treat heart failure that was developed in China, staff at the journal realised two of the patients in the study had received organ transplants in that country.

Dozens of research articles have been retracted or flagged for appearing to have used organs procured from executed prisoners in China, and many journals around the world have introduced policies to avoid such research. JHLT’s ethics statement, published in 2022, bans data on human organ transplants from journals or scientific sessions when they originate from countries, particularly China, where organ procurement from prisoners has been observed.

Journal that published viral study on black plastic removed from major index

Chemosphere, the Elsevier title which in September published an article on “unexpected exposure to toxic flame retardants in household items” such as black plastic cooking utensils, has been removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science index in its December update.

The article, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” received heavy international media coverage questioning whether we should all throw out our black plastic spatulas.

The authors corrected their calculations in a December 15 corrigendum, as reported by Ars Technica. The exposure was an order of magnitude lower than the safe daily reference dose, not approaching it, as they had initially reported, but “this calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” the authors wrote in the notice.

Researcher linked to paper mill activity mysteriously reappeared on list of journal’s editorial board

An engineer accused of being involved in paper mill activities mysteriously reappeared on a list of editorial board members at Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports earlier this year, Retraction Watch has learned.

The journal had “parted ways” with the engineer, Masoud Afrand of the Islamic Azad University in Iran, in March 2022 after an internal audit found “irregularities” in how he handled papers, editor-in-chief Rafal Marszalek told us last year.

Because of “an oversight,” however, Afrand remained on the publication’s website until a story by Retraction Watch and Undark raised concerns about his work last year.

Weekend reads: ‘Race science’ under review; researcher blames critiques on anti-LGBTQ discrimination; the politics of the politics of smell

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Exclusive: Researcher who received settlement to leave University of Iowa won’t be starting new job

A cardiology researcher who left the University of Iowa with a six-figure settlement earlier this year won’t be starting the new job he’d lined up at the Providence VA Medical Center, Retraction Watch has learned.

Justyn Charon, a spokesperson for the Providence VA, previously told us the researcher, Kaikobad Irani, would begin his new position “around November.” When we followed up, Charon confirmed, “there is currently no plan for Dr. Irani to be employed by VA Providence.”

In the meantime, the University of Iowa in Iowa City has launched an investigation about the leak of a report regarding Irani to Retraction Watch that appears to be an attempt to identify the source of the document.

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