Hyperprolific authors have been drawing attention for some time. In 2018, for example, a Nature article reported that “thousands of scientists have published a paper every five days.” And earlier this year El Pais noted that a now-suspended scientist was publishing a paper every … | Continue reading
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? The week at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 40,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNo … | Continue reading
Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories … | Continue reading
Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention. A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the tre … | Continue reading
Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr In late 2021, editors at Laboratory Investigation noticed something strange. The journal was receiving far more emails than usual asking to withdraw manuscripts tha… | Continue reading
After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has le… | Continue reading
Comments | Continue reading
A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill. The Ca… | Continue reading
The authors of a controversial meeting abstract linking ivermectin to lower mortality from Covid-19 have retracted the study, saying that the work has been widely “misinterpreted” and might be lead… | Continue reading
Anna Abalkina Have you heard about hijacked journals? Hijacked journals mimic legitimate journals by adopting their titles, ISSNs, and other metadata. Usually, hijacked journals mirror legitimate j… | Continue reading
A journal has retracted a 2021 paper claiming that vitamin D “significantly reduced the inflammatory markers associated with COVID-19 without any side effects” following criticism that led them to … | Continue reading
Juan Corchado Want a higher h-index? Here’s a way – but be warned, it’s a method that will raise some eyebrows. Take the example of Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist at the University of S… | Continue reading
Rui Fausto Earlier this week, a scientist in Russia posted, on Facebook, part of a letter rejecting a manuscript explaining that “the editors of the Journal of Molecular Structure made a deci… | Continue reading
The authors of a 2021 Nature paper on how climate change might affect the amount of evaporation from the earth’s land surface have retracted the article after learning of a crucial error in their a… | Continue reading
Showa University Hospital There’s a new entry on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. And this one is also the fourth member of the Retraction Watch Century Club. An anesthesiology researcher in Japan… | Continue reading
IOP Publishing has retracted a total of 350 papers from two different 2021 conference proceedings because an “investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication proc… | Continue reading
Pierre Kory A journal has issued expressions of concern for a pair of 2021 meta-analyses purporting to find that ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid-19 after data sleuths raised question… | Continue reading
The overseers of the preprint server SocArXiv have withdrawn a paper which claims that treating Covid patients with ivermectin dramatically reduces their odds of hospitalization, calling the work “… | Continue reading
The National Institute for Ocean Science (Ifremer) in France has flagged 11 papers on PubPeer for concerns including faked authorship and plagiarism, and has blasted the journals involved for their… | Continue reading
via Pixy The pantheon of husband-wife teams in science includes Marie and Pierre Curie, Gerty and Carl Cori, even Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of BioNTech, which collaborated with Pfiz… | Continue reading
An author with ties to researchers believed to have published hundreds of problematic papers has earned his ninth retraction, this time for forged authorship. Mostafa Jalal, once a postdoc at… | Continue reading
A group of researchers in Egypt have lost a second paper on possible treatments for Covid-19 after questions were raised about the legitimacy of their trial findings — and additional retracti… | Continue reading
A group of neurosurgery researchers in Tunisia have lost a 2021 case study on childhood meningitis after the editors discovered evidence of plagiarism and image manipulation. The article, “A … | Continue reading
National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center A paper that was the subject of a four-page correction in 2018, and which helped inform a now-halted clinical trial of a drug for lung cancer, has been r… | Continue reading
Source Springer Nature has retracted 44 papers from a journal in the Middle East after determining that they were rubbish. The articles, which showed up in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences … | Continue reading
A paper claiming that cases of myocarditis spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines that earned a “temporary removal” earlier this month will be permanently removed, according to a … | Continue reading
via Scientific Reports Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might… | Continue reading
The authors of a study comparing hydroxychloroquine and the antiviral agent favipiravir as treatments for COVID-19 have lost the paper after post-publication peer review determined that the data di… | Continue reading
Anna Abalkina A World Health Organization (WHO) database of papers about COVID-19 contains hundreds of articles published in hijacked journals whose publishers have stolen titles and legitimacy fro… | Continue reading
Anna Abalkina A World Health Organization (WHO) database of papers about COVID-19 contains hundreds of articles published in hijacked journals whose publishers have stolen titles and legitimacy fro… | Continue reading
Elsevier says it is reassessing its procedures for special issues after one of its journals issued expressions of concern for six such publications, involving as many as 400 articles, over worries … | Continue reading
Guillaume Cabanac What do subterranean insect provinces and motion to clamor have to do with microprocessors and microsystems? That’s an excellent question. Read on, dear reader. | Continue reading
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the ot… | Continue reading
An Elvis impersonator, via Metro Library and Archive It just keeps happening. For at least the fourth time in two years, a journal has been scammed by someone impersonating a guest editor. The late… | Continue reading
ParentingPatch via Wikimedia A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have… | Continue reading
Image by Martin Slavoljubovski from Pixabay A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the … | Continue reading
Xianglin Shi A former endowed professor at the University of Kentucky has resigned from the faculty days before a committee at the institution was scheduled to vote on whether to fire him for misco… | Continue reading
Michael Dougherty Move over, Reviewer 2: The legal reviewer wants your job. Last month, I was relieved when the journal Research Ethics published my article, “The Use of Confidentiality and A… | Continue reading
via Science Advances Everybody out of the pool. The authors of a 2020 paper in Science Advances on how human sperm propel themselves in a corkscrew fashion like “playful otters” have retracte… | Continue reading
Although it’s the right thing to do, it’s never easy to admit error — particularly when you’re an extremely high-profile scientist whose work is being dissected publicly. So… | Continue reading
The University of Pavia, Yamada via Flickr Here’s a story that’s likely to strike a sour chord with graduate students. A researcher in Italy has lost his 2020 paper, based on work he conducte… | Continue reading
via CDC We’ve been tracking retractions of papers about COVID-19 as part of our database. Here’s a running list, which will be updated as needed. (For some context on these figures, see… | Continue reading
Christina Ross An integrative health journal has retracted a 2019 paper two months after issuing an expression of concern about the article distancing itself from the work. The paper, which a… | Continue reading
ecigarettereviewed.com via Wikimedia A paper suggesting that smokers were significantly less likely than nonsmokers to contract Covid-19 has been retracted because the authors failed to d… | Continue reading
An Elsevier journal has retracted a 2020 paper on the heritability of temperament that a prominent critic derided as “transparently ridiculous,” after concluding that the peer review process —… | Continue reading
Leo Kouwenhoven, credit De Sebastiaan ter Burg The authors of a Nature paper that could have meant a great leap forward for Microsoft’s computing power are retracting it today after other researche… | Continue reading
A law researcher who has falsely claimed to have been affiliated with several institutions has lost eight more publications, bringing his retraction total to 31 and earning him a spot in the top 20… | Continue reading