10 posts published by Ellie Kincaid, Ivan Oransky, Marcus Banks, and Adam Marcus during September 2022| Retraction Watch
10 posts published by Eugenie Reich, Avery Orrall, Retraction Watch Staff, Dalmeet Singh Chawla, and Ellie Kincaid during January 2025| Retraction Watch
Taylor & Francis has threatened legal action against an online group that has made allegations, based largely on vague insinuations rather than evidence, about the publisher and a member of its research integrity team. The group, ScienceGuardians, is an anonymous organization whose website serves as what they call an online “journal club.” On X, it … Continue reading Taylor & Francis threatens legal action against anonymous group’s ‘highly defamatory’ claims| Retraction Watch
PLOS One has retracted a paper linking vitamin D levels and COVID-19 morbidity three years after a critic flagged the data in the study as “deeply bizarre.” The authors objected to the retraction, with one calling it “outrageous” and pointing to flaws in the published notice. The article, which appeared in February 2022, claimed people … Continue reading Authors defend retracted paper on vitamin D and COVID-19 critic called ‘deeply bizarre’| Retraction Watch
Scholarly publishing in mathematics is unlike many other fields, marked by fewer papers, fewer coauthors per paper and fewer citations. But that doesn’t mean the field is immune to fraud and cheating. A pair of papers posted to the arXiv addresses the issue of fraudulent publishing in math, particularly metrics gaming, and offers a list … Continue reading Math has publication fraud, too| Retraction Watch
Easy fixes for complex health problems can be tempting — but they rarely pan out. That seems to be the case for the investigators on one clinical trial who claimed consuming apple cider vinegar caused obese teens and young adults to lose weight. Their article appeared in March 2024 in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health. … Continue reading Study on apple cider vinegar for weight loss retracted after many raise concerns| Retraction Watch
Just as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first of 14 books in a series, our recent coverage of a paper on “Tin Man syndrome” seems to have sequels. After we wrote about a case study describing a man with his heart in his abdomen retracted for plagiarizing images from an April Fools’ joke, … Continue reading Second study using ‘Tin Man Syndrome’ X-ray under scrutiny following Retraction Watch inquiry| Retraction Watch
To guard against identity theft, academic publishers have been using institutional email addresses to verify authors and reviewers are who they say they are. Now, however, findings appearing in a preprint last month on arXiv.org suggest bad actors have found a way to breach this defense – and are routinely doing so. From a pool … Continue reading University email addresses no longer effective bulwark against fake peer review| Retraction Watch
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 … Continue reading Weekend reads: Vaccine contamination paper under investigation; Harvard sues Gino for falsifying evidence; fugitive scientist arrested| Retraction Watch
A professor of physics in Iraq was permanently dismissed last week after a government investigation found he orchestrated a massive fraudulent publishing scheme involving hundreds of thousands of dollars paid into his bank account by unwitting researchers, documents obtained by Retraction Watch show. The scam included a deal between a prominent association of Iraqi academics … Continue reading Exclusive: Iraqi physicist fired by ministry over massive publishing scam| Retraction Watch
The publisher Taylor & Francis is investigating concerns raised on PubPeer about a paper claiming to find DNA contamination in COVID-19 vaccines beyond regulators’ recommended amounts. The move comes as the U.S. body tasked with making recommendations for vaccine use is scheduled to consider the safety of COVID-19 shots, and two of the study’s authors … Continue reading Exclusive: Publisher investigating DNA contamination paper that authors say CDC vaccine committee will consider| Retraction Watch
Earlier this year, Marc Halushka, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, came across a review titled simply “MicroRNA,” an unusually short title in a big field. Looking deeper into the re…| Retraction Watch
The mega-journal Cureus is eliminating author suggestions for peer reviewers, a prompt that is standard practice at some journals when submitting a manuscript. According to an email sent Augu…| Retraction Watch
Leslie McIntosh Leslie McIntosh, like many other denizens of Science Twitter, saw a tweet from a pseudonymous account in mid-March that bemoaned a journal’s lack of action after the owner of the ac…| Retraction Watch
10 posts published by Retraction Watch Staff, Rita Aksenfeld, Lori Youmshajekian, Adam Marcus, and Avery Orrall during August 2025| Retraction Watch
George Church A paper coauthored by geneticist George Church has been retracted following an internal review at a university where several coauthors are based. The article appeared in the Proceedin…| Retraction Watch
10 posts published by Elisabeth Bik, Ivan Oransky, Victoria Stern, Alison McCook, and Mark Zastrow during February 2017| Retraction Watch
Science has retracted a 2010 paper describing a strain of bacteria that purportedly substituted arsenic for phosphorus, an element present in all known life. Science/AAAS Fifteen years after publis…| Retraction Watch
10 posts published by Kate Travis, Martin Yaffe, Retraction Watch Staff, Avery Orrall, Ellie Kincaid, and Dalmeet Singh Chawla during April 2025| Retraction Watch
A prominent cancer research lab is up to three retractions and six corrections for “highly similar” images in papers published between 2018 and 2022. The lab is led by Kounosuke Watabe at Wak…| Retraction Watch
Seven papers on various aspects of vaping and cigarettes published in Toxicology Reports listed each authors’ affiliation – the tobacco company Philip Morris International – when they origina…| Retraction Watch
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…| Retraction Watch
The decision to abandon a process to re-evaluate a review recommending exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has reignited calls for the article to be withdrawn. The 2019 ver…| Retraction Watch
The BMJ’s clinical practice guideline for chronic spine pain Thirty-four medical professional societies have called for The BMJ to retract a recently published guideline recommending against …| Retraction Watch
Less than two weeks ago, PLOS ONE published a paper about the parents of teenagers who appeared to immediately start questioning their gender identity around the time of puberty. Then the critiques…| Retraction Watch
updated October 23, 2024 Welcome to the Retraction Watch Database (RWDB). We’ve prepared this document to help you get started, and to answer some questions that are likely to come up. This documen…| Retraction Watch
Today is a very big day for Retraction Watch and The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit. Bear with me while I explain, starting with some history. When Adam Marcus and I launche…| Retraction Watch
The origin of the phrase? The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several j…| Retraction Watch
Salon today retracted a controversial 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about an alleged link between autism and thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccines. As Salon ex…| Retraction Watch
Last week, we reported on a case at the University of Leiden in which the institution found that a former psychology researcher there had committed research misconduct. In the anonymized report …| Retraction Watch
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…| Retraction Watch
Almas Heshmati Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two profess…| Retraction Watch