A lead researcher at UC Davis has lost three decades-old papers from the same journal for image duplication, and the journal says it is investigating more.
Allen Gao, director of research for the Department of Urologic Surgery at the institution is first last and corresponding author on the papers, published in The Prostate.
The journal retracted the articles – published in 2002, 2004 and 2009 – in February. The papers have been cited 42, 71, and 27 times respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
A U.K.-based surgeon who was suspended last year for conducting colorectal surgeries that caused harm to hundreds of women has had nine of his research papers flagged and one withdrawn.
In July 2024, Tony Dixon, formerly of Southmead Hospital and Spire Hospital in Bristol, England, was suspended for six months by a tribunal at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) after an investigation found the surgeries caused harm in 259 of his patients who underwent a procedure to treat rectal prolapse.
The MPTS panel extended the suspension in January for another six months, during which time Dixon is unable to operate on patients, a spokesperson for the U.K.’s General Medical Council (GMC) told Retraction Watch.
The BMJ’s clinical practice guideline for chronic spine pain
Thirty-four medical professional societies have called for The BMJ to retract a recently published guideline recommending against the use of interventional procedures, such as steroid or anaesthetic injections, to treat chronic back pain.
The journal published the guideline in February as part of its Rapid Recommendations program alongside a meta-analysis and systematic review of published research on the procedures, which the guideline panel used to inform its recommendations. The publications received internationalnewscoverage and enough chatter on social media platforms such as X and Bluesky to placethem in the top 5 percent of all articles scored by Altmetric, a data company that tracks digital mentions of research.
The societies, led by the International Pain and Spine Intervention Society, represent clinicians who prescribe or perform the interventional spine procedures the guideline recommends against. The groups “have serious concerns about the methodology and conclusions drawn in these publications and their potential impact on patient care,” they wrote in a statement dated March 18, and summarized in a rapid response on the BMJ’s website. The statement has since been published in The Spine Journaland Interventional Pain Medicine.
The retraction of “a final batch” of 678 articles concludes Sage’s investigation into questionable peer review, citation manipulation, and other signs of paper mill activity at one of its journals, according to the publisher.
Sage has been investigating the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS) since early 2024 for “indicators that raised concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process underlying these articles,” a Sage spokesperson told us. We reported in August on Sage’s retraction of 467 articles from the journal. The publisher retracted another 416 papers in January. With this latest batch, “our investigation into JIFS is now concluded,” the spokesperson said.
Sage acquired JIFS in November 2023 when it bought IOS Press. The indexing company Clarivate raised concerns about the quality of the articles in the journal shortly after and put the journal’s indexing on hold. Its entry on the Clarivate website still shows the “on hold” flag.
A researcher who retracted two papers last year following a years-long investigation has lost another, this one two decades old.
The same journal also corrected two papers for image duplication within days of the retraction.
The moves followed comments about image similarities on PubPeer. The retraction marks the third for biochemist Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Two of his papers were retracted in 2024, a process that took six years and included a four-year investigation by the university.
The organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has issued misconduct findings against 26 researchers for violations ranging from breach of confidentiality to image manipulation, plagiarism, and buying and selling authorship.
The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, released the results of 15 misconduct investigations on April 11. Several of the investigations involved teams of researchers and many included specific published papers, 53 in total. China has been taking steps to crack down on academic fraud, calling last year for a review of all retracted articles in English- and Chinese-language journals.
Penalties for the researchers ranged from bans on applying for funding or serving as a reviewer, to having research funding revoked — which includes having to return funds already dispersed. In most cases, the restrictions on applying for funding were for three to seven years.
A Bangladesh-based organization focused on development economics and its founder have been churning out papers filled with misstatements, inconsistencies, ethical lapses and “statistically improbable data,” according to researchers involved in an ongoing effort to replicate the work.
One journal has already retracted a paper for falsely claiming to describe a randomized, controlled trial and data collection that failed to adhere to the journal’s ethical guidelines. The study, published in the European Economic Review, was retracted following a March 11 report from the Institute for Replication, or I4R. The group is conducting a broader probe into the Global Development & Research Initiative (GDRI), the organization that implemented the intervention described in the paper.
GDRI’s founder and the study’s sole author is Asad Islam, a developmental economist at Monash University in Australia. Since 2022, Islam has received over $2 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and other organizations, according to a copy of his resume. Islam did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the retraction or the broader concerns about the work. But in a statement posted to his now-deleted account on X, he wrote:
A paper that made the rounds last year for its blatantly “irrelevant” citations has now been retracted.
Elsevier’s International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published “Origin of the distinct site occupations of H atom in hcp Ti and Zr/Hf” in November 2024.
Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” One of the authors told us they included the references as a “joke” after reviewers pressured them.
All 13 of the references include Sergei Trukhanov as an author, and all but one also includes Alex Trukhanov.
