Weekend reads: Stages of academic ‘enshittification’; Alzheimer’s trial sites faking data, say drug developers; Bill Ackman says he funded Gino defense

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up over 460, and our mass resignations list has 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

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

Continue reading Weekend reads: Stages of academic ‘enshittification’; Alzheimer’s trial sites faking data, say drug developers; Bill Ackman says he funded Gino defense

Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

Brian Lucey

Elsevier has pulled a dozen papers by a finance professor in Ireland who oversaw the review of the articles and made “the final decision” to publish them in three journals he edited, according to the retraction notices.  

The professor, Brian M. Lucey of Trinity College Dublin, and his coauthors disagreed with the retractions, which came a few days before Christmas.

“I’m not disputing the fact that I made the final decision” to publish the articles, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations, Lucey told us in an interview. ”What I’m disputing is that that is not prima facie grounds” for retracting them.

Continue reading Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

History journal retracts paper about killing of German WWI POWs

The flagship journal of the Royal Historical Society has retracted a paper positing that British and Canadian soldiers committed “scores” of prisoner executions against German forces during World War I. The move followed an investigation for plagiarism.

The article, written by historian Alex J. Kay of the University of Potsdam in Germany,  was published online in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in early February. On February 19, the co-editors of the journal received a complaint that Kay’s article shared similarities with a 2010 article by Brian Feltman, a historian at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro. 

The journal  looked into the claims and identified several passages that “appeared to follow this source too closely in argument, content, and style, with insufficient acknowledgement,” according to a statement the Royal Historical Society shared with Retraction Watch. The group then shared the passages with external editors, who agreed with the initial findings. 

Continue reading History journal retracts paper about killing of German WWI POWs

‘I have never been asked to review anything’: Editors resign from materials journal

Editors of a materials journal have resigned six years after the title was purchased by a publisher based in Canada, claiming the company “multiplied the number of publications while increasing prices at the expense of quality.”

Revue des Composites et des Matériaux Avancés (RCMA) was published by Lavoisier, a French firm, until late 2018. It was then purchased by the International Information and Engineering Technology Association (IIETA) “without anyone being informed,” former editor-in-chief Francis Collombet wrote in a January 5 resignation email signed by 22 other board members. 

The resignation continues: “We, the members of the RCMA editorial board, can no longer serve as a guarantee for IIETA, which, by buying up quality journals, has multiplied the number of publications while increasing prices at the expense of quality.”

Continue reading ‘I have never been asked to review anything’: Editors resign from materials journal

U.K. surgeon and inventor’s endeavors include unreproducible data and guaranteed publications for a price

Ankur Khajuria offers a “career-changing course” on conducting reviews, which he markets on LinkedIn to medical students and doctors. (source)

“Research will help you get ahead,” British surgeon Ankur Khajuria told his 16,000 followers in a 2024 Instagram post while seated in scrubs embroidered with his name. “If you want to learn about publishing, check out the research academy at HighYieldUK.com.” 

The company, which offers medical students mentoring in publication, isn’t the only commercial venture for Khajuria, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in his mid-thirties active in the media, including as a contestant on Squid Game: The Challenge. His entrepreneurship has extended into medical device manufacturing under the banner of Avance Innovations, which he founded and where he is CEO. For his professional efforts, Khajuria has been given a prestigious award and high praise from his colleagues, with one calling him “brilliant.”

But an investigation by Retraction Watch reveals a different view. Khajuria’s academy raises concerns about promises of publication for a price, and his prolific publication record has set off flags on PubPeer, where commenters have raised allegations of plagiarism. And Avance Innovation’s signature surgical device, while marketed for humans, has apparently been tested on only six rats and no people. Close examination by the Medical Evidence Project, an endeavor of The Center for Scientific Integrity (publisher of Retraction Watch), indicates the data in that rat study lack internal consistency, making them questionable.

Continue reading U.K. surgeon and inventor’s endeavors include unreproducible data and guaranteed publications for a price

Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name

Abduladheem Turki Jalil

Researchers change the name they publish under for many reasons, most of which aren’t fodder for a Retraction Watch story. Trying to skirt a publishing ban is one that is. And another case that recently caught our attention may be in a similar category.  

Researcher Abduladheem Turki Jalil is currently affiliated with the University of Thi-Qar in Nasiriyah, Iraq. His first published paper appears to be a survey on breast cancer from 2019. Jalil’s publications then took off, rising exponentially to more than 100 in 2022. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database, Jalil has an h-index of 44, and on his Instagram profile, he claims to be among the world’s top 2% scientists (he no longer is).

Jalil’s massive output has not failed to attract attention. In 2022, then-sleuth Nick Wise began flagging the researcher’s papers on PubPeer, providing screenshots of Facebook ads selling authorship of articles that matched several of Jalil’s publications. Wise also wrote a blog post about authorship-for-sale networks that mentioned Jalil and his extraordinary productivity. 

Continue reading Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name

Court: University disclosure of researcher’s misconduct did not violate due process

Flavia Pichiorri

An appellate court has dismissed a legal challenge by a cancer researcher against her former institution, ruling the university’s misconduct investigation and disclosure process did not violate her right to due process.  

In 2020, The Ohio State University determined that Flavia Pichiorri, a former postdoc in the lab of Carlo Croce, was responsible for manipulating and reusing images in four publications, spanning from her time in Croce’s lab through establishing her own lab at Ohio State. Pichiorri sued the Ohio State Board of Trustees in April 2023 alleging the release of its misconduct findings to “prestigious journals” and her new employer violated her due process rights, defamed her, and inflicted emotional distress, among other claims. 

But in a December 19 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit concluded Pichiorri’s complaint never identified an adequate “liberty interest” worthy of procedural protections under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. The appeals court affirmed a lower court’s decision tossing the complaint for failure to state a constitutional claim. 

Continue reading Court: University disclosure of researcher’s misconduct did not violate due process

Weekend reads: Evaluating the benefits of open science, a misconduct investigation in Korea, and what we lose in outsourcing reviews to AI

Happy 2026! We’re excited to bring you the first Weekend Reads of the new year.  

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up over 460, and our mass resignations list has 47 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

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

Continue reading Weekend reads: Evaluating the benefits of open science, a misconduct investigation in Korea, and what we lose in outsourcing reviews to AI

Data lost in a flood? The excuse checks out.

Josh Sorenson/Pexels

When two recent retraction notices mentioned data were “destroyed in a flood,” we were skeptical. We’ve seen water take the blame for missing data before. 

In 2019, we wrote about a chemical engineer who said his suspicious data were lost in a laboratory flooding accident. The researcher lost nine papers as a result, as we previously covered. Three years earlier in 2016, researchers in Sri Lanka lost a paper after claiming they, too, had lost their data in a flood. We couldn’t verify the researchers’ claims.

But this time, thanks to a public records request, we’ve confirmed there was in fact a deluge at the researcher’s lab.

Continue reading Data lost in a flood? The excuse checks out.

Cheers to 2025: In which Retraction Watch turned 15, and The Center For Scientific Integrity really became a center

We always enjoy our annual review of the year at Retraction Watch, and 2025 is no exception. But we’re more excited about what lies ahead than what we already accomplished. 

We’re on track for our second-highest year for pageviews — 6.6 million. This year we brought you more than 300 posts. Among our most-read stories this year include ones on metrics: The most-read of the year was on universities whose publication metrics show signs of “questionable authorship practices.” Also among the most-read stories was one on the 20 journals that lost their impact factors this year for citation issues. 

Fakery was also a theme in 2025. A story on a Springer Nature book full of fake references and one on dozens of papers with fake company affiliations were among the most popular of the year. 

Continue reading Cheers to 2025: In which Retraction Watch turned 15, and The Center For Scientific Integrity really became a center