Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Trump cuts funding for Springer Nature pubs; another nonexistent study for HHS; what RFK Jr. got right about academic publishing

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

COPE integrity officer loses 22-year-old paper for image concerns
Slovak science academy ‘strictly condemns’ government official’s paper on mRNA vaccines
Guest post: In defense of direct replication studies (if they even need defending)
Swedish regulators drop investigations into Chalmers’ prosthetics lab
Science issues correction on a paper after repeat experiments and misconduct finding

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 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):

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.”

Swedish regulators drop investigations into Chalmers’ prosthetics lab

Two Swedish agencies have closed their investigations into a high-profile research center at Chalmers University of Technology that was suspended last year for “shortcomings in the operations.”

The Center for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR), known for its work on restoring limb function, was scrutinized and ultimately shut down after a university investigation last April found scientists at the center conducted research without sufficient permits, had inadequate quality assurance processes and handled sensitive personal data poorly, and found “shortcomings” in legal agreements for the center’s operations.

Now, subsequent investigations by the country’s Medical Products Agency, which regulates medical devices and clinical trials, and the Ethics Review Appeal Board have ended, with both agencies declining to pursue further action.

Guest post: In defense of direct replication studies (if they even need defending)

Editor’s note: This guest post by Csaba Szabo is a response to a June 3 post by Mike Rossner on replication studies. We sent a draft to Rossner in advance; find his response below.

The recent guest post on Retraction Watch by Mike Rossner takes a peculiar view of reproducibility. Rossner sets the stage talking about the executive order on “restoring gold standard science” and a call from National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya for replication studies to determine “which NIH-funded research findings are reliable.” Then Dr. Rossner takes this position: “Conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research.”

If systematic in the above statement means “universal,” then, of course, that is impossible, considering the millions of preclinical papers published every year. If, however, systematic means choosing which studies to replicate and then replicating them, then, this is, indeed possible. And this is exactly what Bhattacharya’s statement calls for: “identification of key scientific claims” that require replication. As explained below, this approach can, indeed, work in an effective and efficient manner, especially if it primarily focuses on new manuscript submissions.

Slovak science academy ‘strictly condemns’ government official’s paper on mRNA vaccines

Slovakia’s national science academy has issued a strong critique of a paper on mRNA vaccines coauthored by a member of the country’s parliament. The group called the work “insufficiently detailed” and “lacking controls,” with data that “may be misleading” and conclusions “not supported by sufficiently robust data.”

Peter Kotlár, the paper’s second author, is an orthopedist and represents the far-right Slovak National Party. He is also the commissioner for a review of resource management during the COVID-19 pandemic for the government of populist prime minister Robert Fico, himself known for questioning the science around COVID-19.

The paper appeared May 13 in the Journal of Angiology and Vascular Surgery, published by Herald Scholarly Open Access. “The journal in which the study of Peter Kotlár was published, is not evidenced in databases Web Of Science and Scopus,” a spokesperson for the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Monika Tináková, told us. The issues with the paper reflect “the fact that the journal in which it was published is classified as a so-called predatory journal,” the statement, issued last month, reads.

COPE integrity officer loses 22-year-old paper for image concerns

The concerning figure from the paper, Fig. 2A, with increased contrast, courtesy of “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer.

A journal has retracted a 22-year-old-paper whose first author is the integrity officer for the Committee on Publication Ethics over concerns about image editing that “would not be acceptable by modern standards of figure presentation.”

The 2003 paper, “A recombinant H1 histone based system for efficient delivery of nucleic acids,” was published in Elsevier’s Journal of Biotechnology and has been cited 41 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Sleuth Sholto David, who goes by the name “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer, raised concerns about the image in December 2023, pointing out a “[d]ark rectangle” that appeared to be “superimposed onto the image.”

Weekend reads: Nobel Prize winners and retractions; Nature to publish peer reviews automatically; ‘AI or Die’?

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

When PubMed got it right, Elsevier got it wrong, and Retraction Watch helped clear it up
Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues
Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board
Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year
Editors won’t retract talc and cancer article J&J says is false in court

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

Editors won’t retract talc and cancer article J&J says is false in court

A journal will not retract a paper linking use of talc-based baby powder to cancer, despite legal pressure from the pharmaceutical giant that made the product.

A lawyer representing a unit of Johnson & Johnson in May asked editors of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine to retract a paper on cases of mesothelioma associated with cosmetic talc, following the court-ordered release of the identities of the people described in the article.

The lawyer alleged many of the patients had other exposures to asbestos than cosmetic talc, rendering the article’s fundamental claims “false.”

Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year

Twenty journals lost their impact factors in this year’s Journal Citation Reports, released today, for excessive self-citation and citation stacking. Nearly half of the journals on the list are from well-known publishers MDPI, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.

Clarivate releases the annual Journal Citation Reports each June. For the first time, the company excluded citations to retracted papers when calculating this year’s impact factors. Amy Bourke-Waite, a communications director for Clarivate, told Retraction Watch this change affected 1% of journals, none of which lost impact factors in 2025.

Many institutions use the controversial metric as an indicator of journal quality. And suppressing a journal’s impact factor can have negative effects on the publication and the authors who publish papers in it.

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.

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