Weekend reads: Court tosses out challenge to ORI funding ban; prof steps down after AI citation ‘scandal’; senator seeks journal’s COVID-19 manuscripts

The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, developed and maintained by @abalkina.bsky.social, now has 400 entries.

A federal court has terminated a former researcher’s lawsuit against the U.S. government agency that barred her from receiving federal funds following an agency investigation that lasted 10 years.

Earlier this year, Klaus Heese, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul, noticed a review article he’d worked on had finally been published. But his name wasn’t on it, nor was that of another scientist who had also been involved in preparing the manuscript.

Weekend reads: ‘How long does it take to kill zombie papers?’; ‘The H-Index of Suspicion’; former Springer editors launch new journal

Exclusive: A World Bank report on obesity trends with at least 14 fake references in the text has been removed from the website and is being reviewed by the organization following a Retraction Watch inquiry.

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has been relatively quiet in 2025, releasing just two misconduct findings with only two weeks remaining in the year — the fewest the office has released since at least 2006. ORI typically releases an average of about 10 findings a year.

One journal editor in chief called the results “concerning,” while another thought the analysis was looking for problems on purpose.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has settled a lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act, admitting researchers used images and data that were “misrepresented and/or duplicated." As part of the agreement, @sholtodavid.bsky.social will receive $2.63 million, or 17.5 percent of the $15 million settlement.

Three years after he was let off the hook by a government commission, a former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions for plagiarizing a student thesis in a paper from 2020, Retraction Watch has learned.

Weekend reads: Springer Nature retracts papers using ‘bonkers’ dataset; preprint server welcomes AI authors; ethics editors’ COI disclosures ‘insufficient’

A Cell Press journal quietly removed part of a funding statement from a paper related to gender-affirming hormone therapy that the authors say was included in error. Experts called the move “worrying.”

COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer

One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions

How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint

Weekend reads: ‘The fall of a prolific science journal’; Clinical trials by ‘super-retractors’; ‘How to Study Things That May Not Exist’

Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup--aka glyphosate--“does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted 8 years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed it, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.

“In this case we are up against the seductive allure of claims we’d like to believe are true but aren’t – that tobacco is really not that harmful, at least not by itself, or that we can prevent and cure cancer with some kind of ‘mind work,’ and so on."

"Retractions have become more common in recent years, according to Retraction Watch, an organization that tracks corrections in scientific journals. But they are still rare, amounting to about one in 500 articles published."

The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated.

“I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications.

Weekend reads: How an MIT student’s AI study ‘Fell Apart’; Egyptian scientists, Russian affiliations; the ‘dangers’ of bibliometrics with ‘polluted data’

Springer Nature tells @jacksonwryan.com that Scientific Reports paper about autism with the nonsensical figure will be retracted.

A team of researchers in Belgium got more than they expected when they tried to study potato pathogens: an unwelcome contaminant, a retraction, and a new paper the authors say is “an improvement over the first.”

Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence.

Despite this, Diana Hicks told us, “it certainly feels like mandating metrics gaming and so would encourage a culture not focused on integrity.”

Weekend reads: Our cofounder credited in fake citation; ‘Substantial’ undisclosed COIs in psychiatry research; an AI threat to online surveys

Exclusive: Reviewer recommended against publishing paper on DNA in COVID vaccines

A Science journal has issued an expression of concern over questions about the data in a paper reporting the discovery of an antibody that neutralized all COVID-19 variants in mice.

Springer Nature flags paper with fabricated reference to article (not) written by our cofounder

A paper on a clinical trial of metformin for the treatment of COVID-19 has been retracted nearly two years after the authors flagged data issues that resulted in an expression of concern. It joins our list of more than 600 retracted COVID-19 papers.

Not only were the chatbots unreliable at correctly identifying retracted papers, they spit out different results when given the same prompts.

In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.

An international computing society has begun retracting conference papers for “citation falsification” only months after the sleuth who flagged the suspect articles was convicted for defamation in a lawsuit filed by one of the offending authors.

A paper critiquing post-publication peer review has numerous made-up references, including a @nature.com article falsely attributed to our Ivan Oransky. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Weekend reads: Debunking ‘When Prophecy Fails’; ‘Godfather of AI’ first to reach 1 million citations; ‘Cake causes herpes?’

How did a trio of botanists end up writing a case report about oral cancer?

The @ama-assn.org will cease publication of its ethics journal at the end of this year.

@bmj.com has issued an expression of concern for a paper claiming stem cell therapy can reduce the risk of heart failure. The move comes after sleuths and scientists critiqued the “complete mismatch” between the study data and the article itself.

Bug in Springer Nature metadata may be causing ‘significant, systemic’ citation inflation

How to render a publishing ban moot? Change your surname and just keep submitting.

Weekend reads: Journal retracts ADHD intervention papers; ‘Science and the crisis of trust’; letters to editors surge

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”

"When science is perceived as aligned with political agendas, or when episodes of scientific misconduct receive high-profile media coverage, the legitimacy of science can be damaged, even if such cases are rare."

A week after @bmj.com published a highly publicized paper claiming stem cell therapy can reduce the risk of heart failure, sleuths have unearthed what they are calling “serious” inconsistencies in the data.

Exclusive: Forced to change labs, Kim lost a scholarship and a job offer, and had to repay about AU$90,000 (US$58,400) to his sponsor in South Korea. The university has since offered Kim AU$15,000 (US$9,750) after he sought compensation — although without admitting culpability.

A network of peer reviewers in Italy is targeting medical journals, threatening “both the scientific record and patient safety,” a team of researchers including @deevybee.bsky.social report.

More than three-fifths of the editorial board of a @gigascience.bsky.social resigned after the publication’s operations moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China, and the editors and software team were fired with 30 days’ notice.