Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: How NIH is quietly stalling research; integrity concerns found at clinical trial org; experiments in paid peer review

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Wiley journal retracts over 200 more papers
COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis paper raises questions about what earns post-publication peer review
Do men or women retract more? A study found the answer is…complicated
Misappropriation of undergraduate work leads to study retraction
Former Italian university head faces retractions and criminal investigations

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 58,000 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 — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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

Former Italian university head faces retractions and criminal investigations

A prominent Italian pharmacologist under investigation for embezzlement and rigging university contracts has garnered a dozen and a half retractions in the last year for image alterations and duplications.

But Salvatore Cuzzocrea, the former rector of the University of Messina, told us he did not agree with the retractions because they were decided “without clear communication,” and that none of the papers had problems that he wasn’t able to reply to.

Cuzzocrea, a professor of pharmacology at Messina, is set to face an Italian court over rigging bids for university contracts and is under investigation for allegedly embezzling more than 2 million euros worth of reimbursements.

Misappropriation of undergraduate work leads to study retraction

Researchers in Australia have retracted a 2020 nanotechnology study after their institution’s research integrity office found the paper had misappropriated the work of undergraduate students at their school.

According to the retraction notice, the study stated the data belonged to an industry consulting project when in fact they originated from undergraduate work. The notice reads:

Post-publication, the University of Sydney’s Research Integrity Office found that the article misrepresented research data as being derived from an industry consultancy project when it was from an undergraduate unit of study. In doing so, the work of the undergraduate students and a tutor for the unit of study was misappropriated.

Do men or women retract more? A study found the answer is … complicated

A new study compares retraction rates between men and women.
*Pexels*

Longtime Retraction Watch readers know the scientists on our Leaderboard have changed over the years. But one characteristic has remained relatively constant: There are few women on that list – in fact, never more than one at a time.

So when a recent paper dove into whether retraction rates vary by the gender of the authors, we were curious what the authors found.

The team, from Sorbonne Study Group on Methods of Sociological Analysis (GEMASS) in Paris, sampled 1 million articles from the OpenAlex database, then referenced the Retraction Watch database to compare against their sample.

COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis paper raises questions about what earns post-publication peer review

On March 7, a Sage journal published an expression of concern for an article on cases of myocarditis in people who had received a COVID-19 vaccine.

“The Editor and the publisher were alerted to potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest” and had undertaken an investigation of the article, the notice stated. According to one of the authors, the investigation involved two new peer reviews of the paper.

We’ve reported on many cases of authors disagreeing with retractions other publishers issued after conducting post-publication review processes. The papers often involve hot-button issues – pesticide poisoning, the effect of vaping on smoking rates, an estimation of deaths from the use of hydroxychloroquine early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and President Trump’s role in spreading vaccine misinformation on Twitter before the company suspended his account.

Wiley journal retracts over 200 more papers

The International Wound Journal has retracted 242 papers so far this year as part of an ongoing investigation into manipulated peer review.

We reported in December the journal, a Wiley title, had retracted 27 papers as part of an investigation. A Wiley spokesperson told us the 2025 retractions are part of the same ongoing investigation, and that the editors “anticipate additional retractions in the weeks to come.”

All the retraction notices list manipulated peer review and share similar text, like the notice from this retraction of a 2023 paper:

Weekend reads: On errors and consequences; AI in peer review; Canada’s PM accused of plagiarism

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal retracts letter about pager explosion injuries in Lebanon
Sequence errors are ‘canaries in a coal mine’ in genetics studies, sleuth says
Why RFK Jr.’s pick for a vaccine-autism review may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers
Former VA physician admitted to altering images and deleting data, documents show

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

Former VA physician admitted to altering images and deleting data, documents show

A former cancer specialist sanctioned for “recklessly falsifying data” admitted during an investigation interview that he periodically altered images, documents obtained by Retraction Watch show. He also stated “he may have inadequately or improperly labeled and organized” image files, increasing the chances the images were confused or misidentified.

Alan Lichtenstein, previously a staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and faculty member at UCLA, engaged in research misconduct, according to a November 2024 notice in the Federal Register. Documents we obtained through a public records request revealed his admissions, made during an inquiry that preceded the misconduct ruling.

The documents also reveal a relatively swift process: The initial inquiry by a joint UCLA-VA GLA committee took from June to August 2023 to determine a full investigation should follow. The investigation committee, formally tasked in October of that year, finished its assessment in March 2024. The inquiry committee looked at 18 allegations across 12 papers, and the investigation considered 31 allegations in 13 papers.

Why RFK Jr.’s pick for a vaccine-autism review may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers

David Geier and his father Mark speak to Fox News in 2022.

When it comes to conversations about vaccines and autism, we always have plenty to write about. And the latest news that the Trump administration has tapped David Geier for a study on possible links between immunizations and autism, first reported by the Washington Post, is no exception.

Geier has a long history of promoting the debunked claim of a link between vaccines and autism, STAT and others report. He has published on the topic as recently as 2020. A December 2020 paper lists his affiliation as the Institute of Chronic Illnesses, an organization he founded with his father Mark Geier, court documents say. In 2011, the Maryland State Board of Physicians disciplined Geier for practicing medicine without a license. He’s currently listed in the HHS employee directory as a senior data analyst, the Post reports.

Geier’s first appearance in Retraction Watch was in 2017, when Science and Engineering Ethics, a Springer Nature title, retracted a paper on how conflicts of interest might influence research on the link between vaccines and autism. That paper has been cited 13 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Sequence errors are ‘canaries in a coal mine’ in genetics studies, sleuth says

A genetics researcher came across an interesting paper earlier this year on the gene he studies. The scientist, a doctoral candidate who asked not to be named, decided to take a closer look at which part of the gene, SNHG14, the authors targeted to measure its expression. He ran the sequence of the short strand of DNA, called a primer, given in the paper through a database and found the sequence matched with a completely different gene.

The scientist searched through similar papers and found 19 more across as many journals with the same problem: all their “SNHG14” primers matched with the gene MALAT1/TALAM1. There may be more, but he stopped looking.

Two of the papers he found have been retracted. One appeared in 2023 in Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, a journal Wiley acquired from Hindawi that is no longer publishing. The notice cites inappropriate citations and peer review manipulation. The other article, published in 2022 in the International Journal of Oncology, was retracted for plagiarism.

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