Retraction Watch

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

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Professor suspended after Japanese university finds fishy results in sushi paper
Sage journal retracts more than 40 papers over concerns with peer review, author contributions
Northwestern to pay $2.3 million for falsified research in NIH grants
Nature retracts paper for data manipulation by Ph.D. student
Technobabble papers by professor and editor under scrutiny
Business management journal holds researcher’s paper hostage

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up over 460, and our mass resignations list has 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Business management journal holds researcher’s paper hostage

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

The researcher submitted a manuscript in August to the Academy of Strategic Management Journal in August, thinking he had sent it to the Academy of Management Journal. He asked to remain anonymous for fear of seeming careless “rather than recognizing the real predatory nature” of the journal.

The journal’s homepage notes it is indexed in Scopus, but it was delisted in 2021, nor is it indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science. Its most recent volume contains five single-author articles from nonexistent universities. None of the articles has a DOI or provides an email for the author.

Technobabble papers by professor and editor under scrutiny

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

The reviewer, a neuroscientist in Germany, was confused. The manuscript on her screen, describing efforts to model a thin layer of gray matter in the brain called the indusium griseum, seemed oddly devoid of gist. The figures in the single-authored article made little sense, the MATLAB functions provided were irrelevant, the discussion failed to engage with the results and felt more like a review of the literature.

And, the reviewer wondered, was the resolution of the publicly available MRI data the manuscript purported to analyze sufficient to visualize the delicate anatomical structure in the first place? She turned to a colleague who sat in the same office. An expert in analyzing brain images, he confirmed her suspicion: The resolution was too low. (Both researchers spoke to us on condition of anonymity.)

The reviewer suggested rejecting the manuscript, which had been submitted to Springer Nature’s Brain Topography. But in November, just a few weeks later, the colleague she had consulted received an invitation to review the same paper, this time for Scientific Reports. He accepted out of curiosity. A figure supposed to depict the indusium griseum but showing a simple sine wave baffled him. “You look at that and think, well, this is not looking like an anatomical structure,” he told us.

Nature retracts paper for data manipulation by Ph.D. student

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

The paper, which looked at the sensitivity of lung cancers to immunotherapy, appeared in April 2023 and has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice published today states first author Kevin Ng was responsible for the manipulation in the paper, including manipulated data in several figures. At the time of the experiments, Ng was a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London under the supervision of co-corresponding author George Kassiotis.

Northwestern to pay $2.3 million for falsified research in NIH grants

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

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

The university, based in Evanston, Ill., violated the Civil Monetary Penalties Law when a former researcher at the school falsified work funded by an NIH award, according to a November press release from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Office of Inspector General. The researcher and other investigators then referenced the falsified research in grant applications, reports and other submissions to NIH for two other awards, according to OIG. Together, the three grants totaled about $5 million, with $3.5 million tied to Northwestern.

The Civil Monetary Penalties law allows OIG to impose penalties against individuals and entities that engage in fraud and other improper conduct related to government grants. OIG learned of the researcher’s manipulation when Northwestern self-disclosed the conduct, the release said.

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

Sage has retracted 45 papers from one of its journals for questionable authorship and peer review.

The publisher began an investigation into Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation last year to address citation concerns, a Sage spokesperson told Retraction Watch. The journal was one of 20 titles that lost their impact factors in Clarivate’s 2025 Journal Citation Reports for excessive self-citation and citation stacking.

Sage retracted the articles due to “concerns around the peer review process underlying these articles and author contributions to these articles, as well as the integrity of the research process,” according to the retraction notice, published November 23. The publisher detected “one or more” issues in each of the papers, including patterns of citation manipulation, indicators of third-party involvement and problems with peer review.

Professor suspended after Japanese university finds fishy results in sushi paper

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.

According to the investigatory report, Iwate University scrutinized a retracted paper coauthored by six researchers at the school, including Chunhong Yuan, a professor of fishery systems science. Following the researchers’ inability to provide the investigating committee with appropriate records of the reported experiment, the inquiry found Yuan and two unnamed coauthors – a graduate student and an individual now retired – fabricated claims about the experimental conditions.

Yuan has been suspended for one month starting December 25, according to a press release. The university plans to administer additional training on research integrity for laboratory leaders, according to the report.

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

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Court: University disclosure of researcher’s misconduct did not violate due process
Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name
U.K. surgeon’s endeavors include unreproducible data and publications for a price. Related report from the Medical Evidence Project
‘I have never been asked to review anything’: Editors resign from materials journal
History journal retracts paper about killing of German WWI POWs
Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

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 professor, Brian M. Lucey of Trinity College Dublin, and his coauthors disagreed with the retractions, which came a few days before Christmas.

“I’m not disputing the fact that I made the final decision” to publish the articles, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations, Lucey told us in an interview. ”What I’m disputing is that that is not prima facie grounds” for retracting them.

History journal retracts paper about killing of German WWI POWs

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.

The article, written by historian Alex J. Kay of the University of Potsdam in Germany, was published online in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in early February. On February 19, the co-editors of the journal received a complaint that Kay’s article shared similarities with a 2010 article by Brian Feltman, a historian at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro.

The journal looked into the claims and identified several passages that “appeared to follow this source too closely in argument, content, and style, with insufficient acknowledgement,” according to a statement the Royal Historical Society shared with Retraction Watch. The group then shared the passages with external editors, who agreed with the initial findings.

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