Planet Neuroscientists

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The Citation Payola

in For Better Science on 2025-07-08 05:00:00 UTC.

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Rise in autism prevalence but not traits; and more

in The Transmitter on 2025-07-08 04:00:07 UTC.

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Drosophila, like vertebrates, filter sensory information during sleep

in The Transmitter on 2025-07-08 04:00:06 UTC.

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Why Texas' 'Flash Flood Alley' Is So Deadly, Explained by Geology

A hydrologist explains why Texas Hill Country is known as Flash Flood Alley and how its geography and geology can lead to heavy downpours and sudden, destructive floods

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 20:40:00 UTC.

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The Benefits of Raising Conscientious Kids

Being conscientious will serve kids in the long run. Here are some tips to help them learn that trait

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 20:00:00 UTC.

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Harvard researcher’s work faces scrutiny after private equity deal

Just as a Harvard lab brought in tens of millions of dollars in private equity funding to pursue new treatments for obesity, past research from its lead investigator has come under fresh scrutiny. 

Last month, the lab of Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, secured a $39 million dollar investment from İş Private Equity, an Istanbul-based firm. The partnership centers on FABP4, a protein associated with obesity and other metabolic conditions. 

But over the past decades, two of Hotamışlıgil’s papers have been corrected for image duplications, and since the announcement, renewed scrutiny of Hotamışlıgil’s work appeared on PubPeer, including for issues with statistical analyses. 

“Of course when we become aware of an irregularity or mistake, or someone makes an allegation, we take these issues very seriously and do all we can to address the question,” Hotamışlıgil told us in an email.  

The most recent comments are from Reese Richardson, a computational biologist who looks into scientific reproducibility. Richardson said he became curious about Hotamışlıgil’s work after seeing news about the funding deal. He soon found existing concerns flagged on PubPeer. 

“I figured that it would be worthwhile to check his papers out,” Richardson told us. Initially, two articles piqued his interest, although Hotamışlıgil is not the senior author on either. 

In one PubPeer post, Richardson raised concerns about a 2017 paper in Nature Medicine in which he discovered mislabelling of data, claims of statistical significance the raw data didn’t seem to support, and some missing source data. The author contribution statement indicates Hotamışlıgil oversaw some of the experiments.

Richardson also looked into a 2019 article in Cell Metabolism that contained “either wrongly reported or apparently manipulated” statistics, he told us. Nearly every result “features inexplicable methodological inconsistencies or reporting errors,” he wrote on PubPeer. “These result in a massive exaggeration of the effects observed.”

According to Richardson’s analysis, some statements made in the paper were true only when samples were arbitrarily excluded, but the methods didn’t describe any procedure for the exclusion of samples. According to the author contribution statement, Hotamışlıgil helped with the discussion and interpretation of results. 

James Heathers, a scientific sleuth and director of the Medical Evidence Project — an initiative of the Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch — said the extent of the problem is mostly unknowable. “How can you adjust for the effects of data that isn’t presented?” If outliers are left in the dataset, but redacted from the analysis, “the redaction should be explained in 100% of cases,” he said.

Hotamışlıgil said the work for those two papers was led by Yu-Hua Tseng, another researcher at Harvard, and his group’s involvement was limited. “We have provided some help with their experiments, my fellow Alex Bartelt provided some training and physiology and biochemistry experiments,” he told us. “We were not directly involved with the rest of the paper.”

Apart from Richardson’s recent comments, anonymous commenters on PubPeer have pointed out irregularities in Hotamışlıgil’s published work over the years. A 2008 PLOS One paper, for example, was corrected after a commenter found a duplicated image. A similar issue was flagged in a 2020 paper in Cell Metabolism, which included two identical images in one figure. “We deeply regret this unfortunate error,” one of the authors wrote on PubPeer. That paper was also corrected. Another flagged paper appears to contain similar-looking blots. Hotamışlıgil is listed as the senior and corresponding author on each of these papers.

For a 2019 article in Science Translational Medicine related to FABP4  — the protein at the center of the new funding deal — an anonymous commenter questioned the statistical significance of the findings. After analysing the raw data, the commenter found no statistical significance for some findings reported in the paper, despite them having been reported as such. Hotamışlıgil was the senior and corresponding author for this paper. Heathers said these statistical concerns comprised “a concerning pattern of oversights” and would “necessitate exactly the kind of audit that universities tend not to do.”

Reflecting on the PubPeer posts appearing under his name, Hotamışlıgil said, “In many cases, there is no basis, for example there are several posts where there is no comment, there is even one post about a review that I have written but nothing can be found at the post, and some state opinions or perceptions.”  

Hotamışlıgil also co-authored a 2002 Nature paper with Michael Karin, a prominent cancer researcher and the subject of previous scrutiny for image problems, including in our own reporting. The paper was corrected in 2023 after PubPeer commenters identified duplicated blots. In the correction, the editors wrote: “as the raw data for the blots used in the manuscript are no longer available, unfortunately we cannot ascertain the issue with the figure.” Hotamışlıgil was listed as the senior and corresponding author on this paper. 

He has also co-authored papers with Umut Ozcan, who in 2015 was accused by postdocs of fabricating data and creating a hostile work environment. The case was dismissed from court in 2018. Hotamışlıgil was Ozcan’s graduate advisor, and the two articles where Hotamışlıgil is listed as the senior and corresponding author, and Ozcan as the first, appear to contain duplicate lanes in the blot data or have a mismatched number of lanes. Mike Rossner, an image manipulation consultant, said these PubPeer allegations also had merit, although the mismatched lanes could be a clerical error, which is “unusual, but not unheard of,” he added. 

Harvard has described the Turkish firm’s partnership with Hotamışlıgil’s lab as a “potential model” for revenue for the T.H. Chan School. According to a press release about the funding, the school has seen almost $200 million in federal funding dry up in recent months, and the Trump administration terminated nearly every direct federal grant for research and training. The deal was in progress before the administration came into office, and would have taken place despite the recent decline in federal funding, a Harvard spokesperson told us. 

Iş Private Equity is currently the only private equity funder at the T.H. Chan School, although the school is “accelerating” efforts to engage with the private sector, the spokesperson said. 

Such arrangements between universities and private equity are “not common,” Robert Field, a professor of law and public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, told us. In recent years, private equity has been moving into health care — buying up hospitals, nursing homes and physician practices — but investing into universities is unusual. Private equity is “by nature, profit oriented, and usually short-term profit oriented,” Field said, and are most likely to fund projects that are close to fruition, he said. 

The research has the same oversight, regardless of the funding source, said the Harvard spokesperson, and they will not accept collaboration that “imposes any restriction on our faculty’s freedom to publish and speak about their research.”

Richardson told us he shifted his focus to Tseng, who was the senior author on the two recently flagged papers. Richardson came across a different pair of 20-year-old papers she was the lead author on, both of which seem to contain similarities between parts of Western blots, or inconsistent features in the blot lanes.  

Rossner told us the allegations about image duplications had merit and the data raise enough concerns for a journal editor to want to verify the published results. Some of the PubPeer comments note mismatched lanes in the Western blots; this could be due to clerical error, Rossner said, and one image was too low resolution to tell whether it could be a duplicate. 

Richardson has also since raised concerns about several other papers by Tseng, citing statistical irregularities. 

Tseng told us she is aware of the comments and has “already discussed them with the leading authors.” Since speaking with Retraction Watch, she has responded on the platform, writing, “Thank you for your comments. We are currently reviewing the original data and conducting additional analysis. We will respond to the comments once the investigation is complete.” 

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-07-07 18:39:59 UTC.

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NASA images may help track sewage in coastal waters

in Science News: Science & Society on 2025-07-07 17:00:00 UTC.

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Why Did Texas Flash Flood Waters Rise So Quickly?

Flash floods happen when heavy rains unleash more water than the ground can absorb, causing that water to pile up and flow to low-lying areas

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 16:00:00 UTC.

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Addiction Risk Shows up in Children’s Brain Scans before Drug Use Starts

Brain differences in children and teens who experiment with drugs early show up before they take their first puff or sip

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 15:15:00 UTC.

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Texas Flood Forecasts Were Accurate but Not Sufficient to Save Lives

The National Weather Service issued timely alerts, meteorologists say, but few were listening in the hours before the early-morning flash floods along the Guadalupe River

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 15:00:00 UTC.

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Chronic low back pain may be less likely if you walk – a lot

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-07-07 13:00:00 UTC.

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A new organometallic compound challenges a fundamental principle of textbook chemistry

in OIST Japan on 2025-07-07 12:00:00 UTC.

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Pulsing Magma in Earth’s Mantle Drives Tectonic Plates Tearing Africa Apart

Chemical fingerprints from volcanic rock offer hints of what’s happening in the mantle below the area where three rift zones meet in East Africa

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 10:30:00 UTC.

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Astronaut Matthew Dominick Speaks to Scientific American, Live from the International Space Station

We spoke with NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick in an exclusive, first-ever interview from the cupola of the International Space Station.

in Scientific American on 2025-07-07 10:00:00 UTC.

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Neuroscience’s open-data revolution is just getting started

in The Transmitter on 2025-07-07 04:00:57 UTC.

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Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction

The authors of a paper that went viral with attention-grabbing headlines urging people to throw out their black plastic kitchen tools have corrected the work for a second time.

But a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

The paper, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” originally appeared in Chemosphere in September. The study authors, from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, looked for the presence of flame retardants in certain household plastic items, including toys, food service trays and kitchen utensils. 

The researchers found toxic flame retardants in several items that wouldn’t ordinarily need fire protection, such as sushi trays, vegetable peelers, slotted spoons and pasta servers. Those items, the authors suggested, could have been made from recycled electronics — which do contain flame retardants. 

Then, for kitchen utensils, the authors used findings from another study, which measured how toxic chemicals including BDE-209 transfer from black plastic utensils into hot cooking oil, to estimate potential intake based on findings in their own study. They estimated a daily intake of 34,700 ng/day of BDE-209 from using contaminated utensils, which “would approach the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose” set by the Environmental Protection Agency, they reported.

But the authors miscalculated that reference dose. They had put it at 42,000 ng/day instead of 420,000 ng/day. That hiccup led to the first correction to the paper, published in December. “This calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” the authors said in the corrigendum.

The latest corrigendum, published July 3, states the formula the authors used to estimate exposure to the flame retardant BDE-209 “was misinterpreted.” It continues:

This misinterpretation led to an overestimation of the BDE-209 exposure concentration. The corrected estimated BDE-209 exposure is 7900 ng/day instead of 34,700 ng/day.

“While we regret the error, this is a correction in one exposure example in the discussion section of the study,” lead author Megan Liu of Toxic-Free Future told us by email. “The example was not part of the core research objectives or methods of the study.”

Jones, who spent his career at Dow Chemical, told us the second corrigendum is “inadequate and still incorrect.”

“If the error is sufficiently large to only provide context, the statement in the Conclusions that brominated flame retardants ‘significantly contaminate products’ no longer can be supported and must be corrected or retracted following the reasoning presented in the second corrigendum,” Jones wrote in a letter to the editor published with the second correction.

Jones took to task some of the calculations and other estimates Liu and colleagues made, which the authors refute in a response to Jones’ letter, also published in Chemosphere this week. 

The Elsevier journal was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in December for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Last December an Elsevier spokesperson told us the publisher’s ethics team was“conducting in-depth investigations” of “potential breaches of Chemosphere’s publishing policies.” The journal had published more than 60 expressions of concern in 2024 and has retracted 34 articles so far this year.

Part of delisting means Clarivate no longer indexes the journal’s papers or counts its citations. Google Scholar shows seven citations to Liu’s paper, and Dimensions lists four scholarly citations.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-07-06 14:23:49 UTC.

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Math’s Block-Stacking Problem Has a Preposterous Solution

In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity

in Scientific American on 2025-07-06 11:00:00 UTC.

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Weekend reads: Problematic papers prompt submission pause; HHS walks back Springer Nature cancellation; and hidden prompts for positive peer reviews

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations.
• Do men or women retract more often? A new study weighs in.
• Chinese basic research funding agency penalizes 25 researchers for misconduct.
• Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud.

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 — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

• “Journal plagued with problematic papers, likely from paper mills, pauses submissions.”
• The Trump administration may be walking back the announcement that it’s cutting contracts with Springer Nature, according to an update from Nature. 
• Research papers from 14 institutions contained hidden prompts directing AI tools to give them good reviews.
• “RFK Jr. says medical journals are ‘corrupt.’” Former NEJM editors say they “know he’s wrong.”
• “Mass Leak Showed the Harvard Law Review Assessed Articles for DEI Values. Some Authors Say That’s Not a Problem.”
• “Amid White House claims of a research ‘replication crisis,’ scientists offer solutions” while some call it “overblown.”
• “Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications.” Coverage in Nature & New York Times.
• “Indians are gaming US immigration to get Einstein visas meant for top scientists” using paper mills.
• “In a male-dominated field, my success became misconduct,” says “principal investigator of a multimillion-euro European project.”
• NIH-funded research is now open-access. But could cuts to funding “have a noticeable effect on publication volumes?”
• “Different Methods Of Identifying Preprint Matches Yield Diverging Estimates Of Rates Of Preprinting.” 
• What incentives do companies need to publish research? 
• “Exclusive: NIH still screens grants in process a judge ruled illegal.”
• “Journal Editors Do Not Need To Worry About Preventing Misinformation From Being Spread”: A debate from the European Association of Science Editors conference.
• “Why it’s important to know who did what in a research paper.”
• “Why too much biomedical research is often undeserving of the public’s trust.”
• Researcher who “published one article every three days” loses 16 papers.
• Researcher “advocates a shift toward ethical, responsible, and transparent use of LLMs in scholarly publication.”
• “Panel with AI experts to review appeal” of university student “penalised for academic misconduct” in Singapore.
• “Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline? An Interview with Michael Weinberg.”
• “Attitudes to sanctions for serious research misconduct”: Survey of sleuths and integrity officers.
• “AI, peer review and the human activity of science: When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.” 
• “Developing a Criteria Framework for Peer Review: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis.”
• “How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-07-05 10:00:00 UTC.

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Climate Change’s Fingerprints Came Early, a Thought Experiment Reveals

Climate change left its signature on the atmosphere early in the industrial revolution, reveals a thought experiment investigation

in Scientific American on 2025-07-04 14:00:00 UTC.

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Workers Have Died in Extreme Heat as OSHA Has Debated Protections

The June heat dome contributed to the deaths of at least three people. They have died as federal regulators have weighed whether to finalize the nation’s first heat protection rule for workers

in Scientific American on 2025-07-04 12:00:00 UTC.

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Human Gut Bacteria Can Gather Up PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals’

When tested on their own and in mice, these bacterial strains from the human microbiome show promise in accumulating PFAS

in Scientific American on 2025-07-04 11:30:00 UTC.

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Can Life Survive the Death of the Sun?

The future is bright—too bright—for life as we know it once the sun transforms into a red giant star

in Scientific American on 2025-07-04 10:45:00 UTC.

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How does air pollution impact your brain?

No, this won't be very cheerful either, but maybe next time.

The post How does air pollution impact your brain? appeared first on Neurofrontiers.

in Neurofrontiers on 2025-07-04 08:06:57 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 4.07.2025 – Why should I care about this?

in For Better Science on 2025-07-04 05:00:00 UTC.

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Proof That Adult Brains Make New Neurons Settles Scientific Controversy

Adult brains grow new neurons, and scientists have finally pinpointed where they come from

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 19:30:00 UTC.

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Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud

Mario Biagioli, a distinguished professor of law and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles — and a pioneering thinker about how academic reward systems incentivize misconduct — passed away in May after a long illness. He was 69. 

Among other intellectual interests, Biagioli wrote frequently about the (presumably) unintended consequences of using metrics such as citations to measure the quality and impact of published papers, and thereby the prestige of their authors and institutions. 

“It is no longer enough for scientists to publish their work. The work must be seen to have an influential shelf life,” Biagioli wrote in Nature in 2016. “This drive for impact places the academic paper at the centre of a web of metrics — typically, where it is published and how many times it is cited — and a good score on these metrics becomes a goal that scientists and publishers are willing to cheat for.” 

Such cheating takes the form of faking peer reviews, coercing citations, faking coauthors, or buying authorship on papers, among other tactics described in the 2020 book Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research, which Biagioli edited with Alexandra Lippman. 

“Mario saw the increasing reliance of metrics within scholarship, and their gaming, not simply as a moral problem but rather as an intellectual problem,” said Lippman, whom Biagioli mentored in a postdoctoral fellowship. “Mario was interested in how the gaming of metrics fundamentally changed academic misconduct from epistemic crime – old fashioned fraud – to a bureaucratic one – the post-production manipulation of impact.” 

Lippman and Biagioli organized a conference at the University of California, Davis, in 2016 on the topic, from which the book Gaming the Metrics followed. “To create a serious conversation about this new issue, Mario invited not only historians of science, computer scientists, anthropologists and other scholars but also misconduct watchdogs and other practitioners from the trenches to share their research, expertise and perspectives,” Lippman said. 

That conference “can be considered the moment when the milieu of the new style science watchdogs, to which belongs Retraction Watch, was launched,” said Emmanuel Didier, a sociologist and research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. “It was the first time everyone met the other,” said Didier, who participated in the meeting. 

Biagioli “had high expectations for excellence, a strong sense of adventure, and a constant twinkle in his eye along with a biting sense of humor,” Lippman said. He was “an expansive thinker,” she said, and his intellectual legacy “is also expansive through his work not only on scholarly metrics and misconduct but also on scholarly credit, intellectual property, copyright, academic brands, and scientific authorship.” 

Biagioli earned his Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2019, he taught at many institutions, including Harvard University, Stanford, and UC Davis, where he founded the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. His books addressing the history of science include Galileo, Courtier, published in 1993. 

“I learned something from every conversation I had with Mario, and everything of his I read,” said our Ivan Oransky. “His way of looking at the structure of academia and scholarly publishing was unique, bracing, and constructive.”

Biagioli’s idea that “the article has become more like a vector and recipient of citations than a medium for the communication of content” is “a guide to what research assessment has become,” Oransky said. “He is already missed.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-07-03 19:13:02 UTC.

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Attention arXiv users: legacy search endpoint /find discontinued

Recently we turned off arXiv’s legacy search endpoint, https://arxiv.org/find. It was deprecated in 2018 as part of a server migration initiative. Its replacement, https://arxiv.org/search/, was introduced in 2018.

The decision to retire the legacy /find endpoint is part of migrating arXiv to the cloud. The legacy endpoint’s underlying code is no longer in service as part of this move. Although some users may have continued to use the legacy endpoint, the current search endpoint offers an improved, user-friendly interface while retaining the most commonly used functionality.

The full-text search is available from the search box on the arXiv homepage by selecting “Full text” from the “All Fields” dropdown menu.

in arXiv.org blog on 2025-07-03 18:58:41 UTC.

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Machine learning spots neural progenitors in adult human brains

in The Transmitter on 2025-07-03 18:00:41 UTC.

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First Human Genome from Ancient Egypt Sequenced from 4,800-Year-Old Teeth

Forty years after the first effort to extract mummy DNA, researchers have finally generated a full genome sequence from an ancient Egyptian, who lived when the earliest pyramids were built

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 18:00:00 UTC.

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How Massive Medicaid Cuts Will Harm People’s Health

Evidence shows that Medicaid improves people’s health and is particularly vital for babies, older people in need of long-term care and people in rural communities

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 15:40:00 UTC.

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New Interstellar Object Comet 3I/ATLAS—What We Know So Far as It Zips through the Solar System

All eyes are on Comet 3I/ATLAS as astronomers worldwide chase the exotic ice ball through our solar system

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 15:15:00 UTC.

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Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act Will Raise U.S. Climate Emissions

Four research firms project that the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act will raise greenhouse gas emissions and likely put U.S. and global climate goals out of reach

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 14:50:00 UTC.

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Record-Breaking Results Bring Fusion Power Closer to Reality

Breakthroughs from two rival experiments, Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X and the Joint European Torus, suggest the elusive dream of controlled nuclear fusion may be within reach

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 12:00:00 UTC.

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How Trump’s Federal Funding Cuts Are Hurting Early-Career Researchers and American Health

Canceled grants and slashed budgets are disproportionately affecting junior health researchers, dealing a major blow to the future of science and society in the U.S.

in Scientific American on 2025-07-03 11:00:00 UTC.

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Vaccine policy in the U.S. is entering uncharted territory

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-07-02 21:33:18 UTC.

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Chinese funding agency penalizes 25 researchers for misconduct 

In its second batch of misconduct findings this year, the organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has called out 25 researchers for paper mill activity and plagiarism. 

The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, gives more than 20,000 grants annually in disciplines ranging from agriculture to cancer research. The NSFC publishes the reports periodically “in accordance with relevant regulations,” the first report, released in April, states. The organization awarded 31.9 billion yuan, or about US$4.5 billion, in project funds in 2023.

The NSFC published the results of its investigations on June 13. The reports listed 11 specific papers and 26 grant applications and approvals. 

The misconduct findings were similar to those in the NSFC’s first first batch in April. Offenses included  “buying and selling of experimental research data” and “plagiarism, forgery and tampering.” As a result, NSFC barred those researchers from applying for or participating in grants for three or five years, and, in some cases, required grant recipients to pay back funds they’d already received. 

Seven of the studies on the list, coauthored by 14 of the sanctioned researchers, were retracted before the report was released. 

An email to the NSFC asking whether the organization informed the journals about the misconduct findings bounced back, but correspondence with several of the journals suggests the NSFC did not contact them. 

Two of the papers that haven’t been retracted came from Oncotarget, an embattled journal. Elena Kurenova, the scientific integrity editor for the publication, told us the articles were already under investigation before the NSFC findings, but the journal was “not aware of the current NSFC report.” Kurenova told us given the results of their investigation and the report, “the Editorial decision was made to retract these papers.” 

Four of the papers listed in the report come from journals published by Dove Press, part of Taylor & Francis: two in Onco Targets and Therapy (and retracted in 2022 and 2023), one in Cancer Management and Research, which the journal retracted in 2021, and one in the International Journal of Nanomedicine.  

The editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Nanomedicine, which has not retracted the paper included in the report, did not respond to our request for comment. 

Mark Robinson, media relations manager from Taylor & Francis, told us the article from International Journal of Nanomedicine was “already under investigation” before the report was released. He also said NSFC didn’t contact the journals about their report.

Two researchers named in the report, Yao Yang and Jinjin Wang, of South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, included a paper they wrote in their grant applications that was retracted in 2024. NSFC penalized them for “buying and selling papers” and “unauthorized marking of other people’s scientific fund projects,” among other offenses. Neither responded to our request for comment. 

Another paper by Yang and Wang, published in Water, had those same offenses  and had not been retracted when NSFC’s report was released. Jovana Mirkovic, journal relations specialist at MDPI, which publishes Water, told us in an email the journal would be “issuing a retraction notice for this article.” She did not respond to our follow-up email regarding whether the investigation began before our email or whether she was aware of the NSFC report. 

He Juliang, who listed affiliations with Guangxi Medical University, had two of his projects revoked. The notice says the “allocated funds” were “recovered” from the researcher. Juliang did not respond to our request for comment. 

Wen Zhong, who listed affiliations with Jiangxi University of Science and Technology in Ganzhou, used a retracted paper in the application form, progress report, and final report of a project, according to the NSFC. The report also says he committed “plagiarism, forgery and tampering, use of other people’s signatures without consent, and unauthorized marking of other people’s fund projects.” Zhong did not respond to our request for comment. 

Ten of the researchers were sanctioned after they “plagiarized the contents of other people’s fund project applications,” the report states.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-07-02 18:03:33 UTC.

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Do men or women retract more often? A new study weighs in

When you look at retracted papers, you find more men than women among the authors. But more papers are authored by men than women overall. A recent study comparing retraction rates, not just absolute numbers, among first and corresponding authors confirms that men retract disproportionally more papers than women. 

The paper, published May 20 in the Journal of Informetrics, is the first large-scale study using the ratio of men’s and women’s retraction rates, said study coauthor Er-Te Zheng, a data scientist at The University of Sheffield. The researchers also analyzed gender differences in retractions across scientific disciplines and countries.

Zheng and his colleagues examined papers from a database of over 25 million articles published from 2008 to 2023, about 22,000 of which were retracted. They collected the reasons for retraction from the Retraction Watch Database, and used several software tools to infer each author’s gender based on name and affiliated country. 

“The biggest limitation is gender inference,” Zheng said. The researchers couldn’t determine gender of the first authors of 47.1% of the retracted papers and 23.3% of the non-retracted papers. The software tools the authors used draw on historical Western-based name databases, which do not account for nonbinary authors or those from non-Western countries. 

Whether looking at first authors or corresponding authors, men had an overall higher overall rate of retraction than did women, but the researchers found no difference when looking at papers retracted due to mistakes. However, men had higher rates of retraction for misconduct, especially plagiarism and authorship issues.

“The difficulty from all these studies, when we say that men are committing more misconduct than women, is what do we have to do?” said Evelyne Decullier, a methodologist at Hospices Civils de Lyon in France who examined gender differences in retractions within health sciences in a study published in 2021. “We need to understand what is behind that.”

Among the 10 countries with the most retracted articles, among first authors, men had a higher retraction rate than women in Iran, Pakistan, and the United States. Women had higher retraction rates in China and Italy, though the researchers noted that the data from China needs further validation, as over 80% of the authors with unidentified gender were affiliated with Chinese institutions. 

Men had higher retraction rates in biomedical and health sciences, and life and earth sciences. These results align with prior studies, said Ana Catarina Pinho-Gomes, a public health consultant at University College London who conducted a similar 2023 study focusing on retractions within biomedical sciences. In contrast, Zheng and his colleagues found that women retracted papers at a higher rate in mathematics and computer science.

While the study was descriptive and cannot address the reason for this result, the authors have a hypothesis. “There may be some cultural and expectational differences in this field that women are historically underrepresented in,” Zheng said. “This may create some pressure or expectation for female researchers.” 

In addition to pressures at the author level, “perhaps there is a bias in the evaluation process that leads to female authors having their work scrutinized more closely,” said Mariana Ribeiro, a postdoctoral researcher at Brazil’s National Cancer Institute who has examined gender differences in self retractions. (She is also a Sleuth in Residence at the Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch). Alternatively, “we cannot disregard the possibility that women may be more reluctant to self-correct or to accept corrections to their work, fearing negative repercussions that could also be amplified by existing gender biases.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-07-01 20:48:45 UTC.

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U.S. National Climate Assessments Website Goes Dark

Links to the U.S.’s most comprehensive climate reports—the National Climate Assessments—disappeared from the Internet on Monday, along with the official government website that houses them

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