Despite the False Claims Act's banner year, legal experts say a pending challenge may weaken the law’s whistleblower power and impact.

"This is not a matter of censorship or 'cancellation' of results that do not square with biases," write Arthur Caplan and Jonathan Moreno. "It is a question of ensuring that there are no incentives for unethical research."

Last August, a reader alerted the editor of a medical journal to a recent case report “riddled with irreconcilable contradictions, medically impossible claims, fictional terminology, and ethical lapses.”

Weekend reads: Largest leucovorin-autism trial retracted; a paper mill detector for cancer research articles; infant opioid poisoning report flagged

A former cancer researcher at University of Oklahoma Health Science Center has been barred from participating in federally funded research without supervision for three years after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found he falsified data in grant applications.

If a plagiarized paper by an author who claims he didn’t write it disappears from a journal’s website with no notice, did it ever exist in the first place?

The Lancet has put an expression of concern on a 2006 case report of a baby’s death purportedly from morphine poisoning through breast milk. The decision comes just days after the New Yorker published a year-long investigation into the death and the controversies that have surrounded it.

Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.

Felices is obligated to withdraw the two books and seven articles or to “clearly mark them as plagiarism,” according to the judgment.

Weekend reads: Did a researcher ‘Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning?’; ‘Critical social media posts linked to retractions’; arXiv ‘clamps down on AI slop’

Forget pickles and ice cream. I published a fake paper on pregnancy cravings for prime numbers.

The journal joins 75 others with at least 145 retractions.

What do you do for an outing when you're Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, the co-founders of Retraction Watch? See a play called Retraction, of course. www.retractionplay.com

“The authors have stated that these non-existent references resulted from the use of generative AI to convert the PubMed IDs of cited articles into a structured reference list."

While plagiarism can sometimes be difficult to prove, stolen figures and identical metadata were the death knell for a recent article involving chicken mortality.

The man who discovered that S’s paper was probably sold on Telegram knew about paper mills because he had previously paid 10,000 INR with the hope of receiving help in publishing quickly in a journal indexed by Scopus.

Weekend reads: Why 500 retractions per month matter; another EOC for former Stanford president; and an argument for ‘slow science’

“I have looked at thousands of @pubpeer.com allegations, and this is the first time I have come across what appear to be fabricated allegations."

The notice, published today, applies to a 2020 meta-analysis measuring population patterns of freshwater and terrestrial insects and predicting what might drive changes in population numbers.

A Taylor & Francis journal has retracted a widely-read paper linking cardiac-related mortality to COVID-19 vaccines after an unsuccessful legal attempt by the lead author to block the withdrawal. That author says he is considering further legal action against the publisher.

At wit’s end after a publisher ignored her repeated requests for a correction, Ursula Bellut-Staeck took the extreme step of issuing her own retraction. But is that even a thing?

Another expression of concern for former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Four of his papers have been retracted. retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSe...

MDPI has retracted a study about vaping that one expert said seemed “like a joke” almost two years after the publisher received a complaint about the flawed work.

Corrections, biases, and humility in science: Tuan V. Nguyen escaped Vietnam in 1981 as part of the mass “boat people” exodus of refugees, taking to dangerous waters just a few months after his older brother tried the same and disappeared. Today, he's a professor and bone researcher in Australia.

Science journals retract 500 papers a month. This is why it matters

Weekend reads: A retraction in Nature; penalties for ‘retraction hotspot’ universities?; an analysis of PISS journals

We're hiring an intern! Apply here.

A “scholarly business and management publication” is holding a researcher’s paper for ransom, requesting the author pay to withdraw the article.

After we reached out to Eren Öğüt, his profiles at Google Scholar, ORCID and Frontiers’ Loop all vanished.

Nature has retracted a paper after an investigation at a U.K. institution found the first author — then a doctoral student — manipulated data.

A researcher accused of falsifying research in work funded by the National Institutes of Health has cost Northwestern University $2.3 million.

Sage journal retracts more than 40 papers over concerns with peer review, author contributions

A university in Japan has suspended a fishery science professor for a month after its investigation found fabrication in a retracted paper on fish freezing.

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

The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List now contains 50 entries.

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 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.

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.”

Khajuria’s academy raises concerns about promises of publication for a price, and Avance Innovation’s signature surgical device, while marketed for humans, has apparently been tested on only six rats and no people in a study that lacks internal consistency.

The website of the foundation Jalil founded, which publishes several journals, hosts conferences and offers editorial services, also referred to him as Al-Attabi until recently. But after we contacted him, the name of the foundation’s CEO and owner changed to “Mustafa Tareq Shanshool" on the site.

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.

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

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

"Productivity metrics and academic rankings have created a market addicted to H-index and citation counts. When you look at it in the light of day, the problem is evident, but publishers avoid acknowledging their role in the productivist system."

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

The BMJ has retracted a paper on a clinical trial of different methods of vascular access during cardiac arrest after an expert raised concerns about the randomization in the trial.

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.