Weekend reads: arXiv to ban researchers with hallucinated references; U.S. restrictions on foreign coauthors; retracted papers by Max Planck

A 2025 paper claiming the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques has been retracted after widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims.

In which the Retraction Watch Database makes it into the Harper's Index. harpers.org/harpers-inde...

How the media hypes “research that is absurd on its face”

A prolonged feud between two physicists in Italy that has played out for years in journal letters and blog posts has resulted in a defamation award for one of the rivals.

Scrolling through an online image dataset, Adrian Barnett pointed out a few familiar faces: Sylvester Stallone, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig. “You can see,” Barnett said, “this is just a comically bad dataset.” retractionwatch.com/2026/05/18/k...

A new rule in Peru restricts authors with retractions from getting special bonuses.

Weekend reads: Autism-vaccine researcher arraigned; ‘accidental watermarks’ in medical literature; mass resignations and zombie journals

"Our findings do not support the claim that Australia’s heavily self-regulatory approach is working well to ensure robust and visible correction of the research record."

"OpenAlex operates on a shoestring, with institutional memberships at $5,000/year. Retraction Watch is a nonprofit that depends on donations. ORCID is sustained by member organizations. These are [the chronically underfunded] foundations on which the credibility of AI-generated science depends..."

"A simple strategy of hunting for odd language errors might help finger fake research papers churned out by so-called paper mills:" A finding by @jamesheathers.bsky.social from our sibling, the Medical Evidence Project.

A BMJ Group journal has retracted a paper nearly nine years after a journalist raised concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest and the study’s details contradicting those of its trial registration. A patient death was also omitted.

An Elsevier journal has removed two papers on a discredited alternative treatment for cancer nearly half a decade after they were published, after researchers found a quarter of patients in case reports of the therapy, cesium chloride, died from taking the substance.

Daniel Bar-Shalom was incensed. The real problems started in the middle of the article he was asked to review, in what he came to think of as “the fill of a shit sandwich.”

Dormant volcanoes erupt periodically. Joachim Boldt, whose fraud was discovered more than a decade ago, still spews retractions. This week, he went from 236 to 239. He remains comfortably atop the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.

Weekend reads: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’

An appeals court in Switzerland has overturned a 2025 defamation conviction against @solalpirelli.bsky.social, a sleuth who had identified dozens of conference proceedings with signs of citation manipulation. The ruling orders the plaintiff to pay Pirelli's legal expenses.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today.

It was a breakthrough, according to Russian media: Researchers had developed a new kind of nanoparticle that could help detect breast cancer in an MRI and kill tumor cells at the same time. But four years later, the journal that had published the paper retracted it.

Winning science fair project beset by misconduct allegations. And court orders historian to repay grant funding for plagiarism. Today's Retraction Watch Daily.

A science competition for middle and high school students in Vietnam is embroiled in controversy as its winners head to next week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair – widely considered the most prestigious event of its kind.

A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.

The U.S Office of Research Integrity has formally announced a 15-year funding debarment against a former Rice University scientist for research misconduct, resolving allegations that arose 17 years ago.

"Often, scientists are ‘100% sure’ of something, and anyone questioning that position is treated as an idiot," writes @virusesimmunity.bsky.social.

"Across quantitative and qualitative analyses, the AI-generated texts displayed a consistent pattern of compressed discourse, reduced hedging, and a heightened reliance on boosting markers that conveyed confidence and moral urgency."

"Our findings highlight that a brief, low-cost intervention can measurably improve the scientific accuracy of journalism, offering a scalable strategy for news organizations and training programs."

Weekend reads: A retraction for top cancer researcher; paper mill ads paired to IEEE proceedings; about that study on ChatGPT and learning

The New England Journal of Medicine @nejm.org hasn't retracted a paper since 2020's Surgisphere debacle. This week, it retracted a clinical image with a picture the authors admit was manipulated with artificial intelligence, @armarc.bsky.social reports.

Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study

A researcher claims a case report he coauthored was plagiarized by doctors at the same institution three years later — a paper he was alerted to when a journal sent it to him for review.

Neither retractions, expressions of concern, nor other editorial notices seem to keep authors from continuing to cite problematic papers, according to a look at what happened to more than 170 articles by one author.

Weekend reads: What paper mills charge for author slots; UK Biobank data breached; what researchers think of the future of science

Want your name on a scholarly paper? Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600, according to a new dataset collected by @reeserichardson.bsky.social, Spencer Hong and @abalkina.bsky.social.

Journal goes dark after impersonating @erictopol.bsky.social and others

A chemist in Austria who earned a retraction earlier this year is under investigation by his former university, a national research integrity agency and the publisher Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned.

"Based on titles and abstracts, in over 80% of cases the LLMs claimed that a retracted article had not been retracted (GPT OSS 120B: 82%; Gemma 3 27B: 84%; DeepSeek R1 72B: 88%)."

An author in China with nearly 500 preprints has continued to add his daughter’s name to papers – despite her insistence she was not involved.

A leading pharmacologist in Italy accused of embezzling research funds is now the subject of coordinated editorial action by one of the field’s professional societies.

10 years ago today, @elisabethbik.bsky.social published a preprint heard around the world.

Weekend reads: An alternative to the impact factor in China; the clinical trials of six ‘superretractors’; Retraction Watch goes to Capitol Hill

45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’

Our Ivan Oransky "has suggested that journals pump the brakes on special issues, to which journals have responded that authors love these editions." "I mean, bank robbers love it when you put them in the bank as a security guard, but I don't think that's a good idea."

“Game-changer” breast cancer study retracted as Indiana researcher out of his post

"Some of this [China's] rise [in scientific prestige] is due to investment by the Chinese government and real productivity gains. But some of it is also due to gaming the metrics by which science output is judged." From our written testimony to the House science oversight subcommittee.

BMJ’s Journal of Medical Genetics has retracted the bulk of a seven-year-old special issue for an “irreparably compromised” review process and “improbable device use.”

A scientist found to have committed research misconduct used a fake email communication with an NIH researcher’s address to support his claims of governmental retalliation, Retraction Watch has learned. He also threatened to sue us more than a decade ago.

Weekend reads: LLMs ‘are not the problem’; Cash for peer review ‘doesn’t work,’ project finds; ‘Many Flaws, Few Retractions’ in vaping literature

A Canadian panel is proposing several changes to its guidelines for responsible conduct of research, including a provision that effectively removes any statute of limitations on investigations into potential misconduct.

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?