Retraction Watch

Martin Tramèr was editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Anaesthesiology during what he once called in print “The Boldt debacle.” The misconduct scandal involving hundreds of papers by Joachim Boldt broke to the surface in 2010, but journals continue to retract papers by the disgraced German anesthesiologist – and researchers have continued to cite the work.

The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited. Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep.

Four months after the Office of Research Integrity sanctioned a former postdoc for falsifying images in grant reports, a Science journal is retracting a paper by the researcher for image duplication. After reading our story about the ORI’s findings, sleuth Paul S. Brookes took a look at the researcher’s ORCID profile and ran his papers through an AI tool that spots duplicate images.

This past year, Zhihao Lei has signed his name to at least 35 letters to the editor of medical journals, weighing in on topics from ICU care to breast cancer. In eight of them, he identified himself as a Ph.D. at Cornell University, although he held only a bachelor’s degree at the time.

A developer of an AI tool for conducting literature reviews said he and his team were “excited and honored” when a Cochrane journal had extended a “specific and individual invitation” in January 2025 to submit an article describing their system. Kevin Kallmes, the chief executive officer at and founder of Nested Knowledge, and five of his colleagues wrote the manuscript and submitted their paper describing the procedure for using AutoLit.

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

Eighteen associate editors of the journal Statistics and Computing have announced they will resign after Springer Nature announced the journal would require a fee to publish.

Yannick Griep, a former rising star in management research at Radboud University in the Netherlands, is set to lose an undisclosed number of articles from a journal he once edited, Retraction Watch has learned.

Susan Schiffman on WRAL A North Carolina judge has scrapped a defamation suit by the maker of Splenda against a scientist, ruling the research dispute doesn’t belong in court. TC Heartland LLC, which manufactures the artificial sweetener, sued researcher Susan Schiffman in 2023 alleging she made defamatory remarks to the public about the product following a study she authored about sucralose.

Max Planck Today the Retraction Watch list of Nobelists who have retracted papers bids Verabschiedung to Max Planck. After days of scrutiny, Springer Nature has restored two papers by Planck, who won the Nobel for Physics in 1918, reversing a 2011 decision to retract the articles for “copyright violations.” Both articles are back, and now carry the following statement: “23 December 2011 This article has been withdrawn due to copyright violation. 06 July 2026 This article has been reinstated.