Research integrity and misconduct

JAMA Internal Medicine has declined to retract a 2000 oxycodone-for-osteoarthritis trial despite a co-author briefly backing the request and litigation showing sponsor Purdue Frederick knew of unreported withdrawal symptoms. The journal’s reasoning turns on a narrow standard — fabrication or falsification — that says little about sponsor-level data omission, a gap research-integrity offices should understand.

Clarivate delisted Cureus from Web of Science in October 2025. What it means for JIF eligibility, researcher CVs, and evaluating mega-journal quality.

Clarivate has restored Web of Science indexing for the Elsevier mega-journal Heliyon, ending a hold placed in September 2024 that followed an internal audit resulting in more than 650 retractions and over 1,000 corrections and expressions of concern.

A Princeton student’s own request led Wiley to retract her PVC-biodegradation paper in May 2026 — a rare, author-initiated retraction. Here’s the practical decision tree for correction vs. retraction vs. expression of concern, why journals and funders treat self-reporting favorably, and how to document it.

Elsevier has retracted 120+ special-issue articles since June 2026 for systemic peer-review manipulation, with more retractions expected.

A 2025 ORI case summary found that Liping Zhang, PhD, a former Assistant Professor of Nephrology at Baylor College of Medicine, falsified and fabricated western blot and microscopy images across four NIH grant applications (NIDDK, NCI) and three unpublished manuscripts. Zhang did not contest the findings; ORI imposed a two-year debarment and PHS advisory-committee exclusion beginning January 16, 2025.

ORI found Ryan Evanoff, a former WSU scientific assistant, fabricated and falsified DNA sequencing data in NIH-funded research, resulting in a three-year federal debarment.

A Princeton sophomore’s self-initiated retraction of her sole-authored PVC-biodegradation paper, and her follow-up clarification that she did not personally run the described experiments, is a clean real-world case for research offices: a disclosure gap between calculated/modeled results and reported experimental findings, and how CRediT-style contributor-role statements are built to close exactly that gap.

BMJ Public Health retracted Saskia Mostert’s COVID-19 vaccine mortality paper on Aug. 11, 2026, roughly two years after first flagging it — after the paper was cited in a June 2026 Senate hearing while still under an unresolved expression of concern.

Claude Fable 5 now leads LMArena’s Text leaderboard for human-preferred writing, narrowly ahead of Opus 4.6/4.7. For research offices, better AI writing quality doesn’t loosen disclosure obligations — it raises the stakes, since more human-like output means detection tools become a weaker backstop.

Claude Opus 5 turns reasoning effort into a per-query dial (low through xhigh/max) rather than a per-model choice, complicating how institutions license, disclose, and govern AI tools.

A UVA-led study analyzed 352 probiotic products from major U.S. pharmacy chains and found only 36 unique bacterial species represented, highlighting a gap between commercial formulation and the mechanistic evidence for what each product claims to do.

Baylor College of Medicine researchers recorded individual hippocampal neurons in epilepsy-surgery patients under general anesthesia and found the brain still distinguishes nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and even predicts upcoming words — evidence of structured language processing without consciousness. Because the data can only be collected while the patient is unconscious, all consent has to be obtained pre-operatively, a genuinely distinct human-subjects-ethics scenario from research where a participant can object in real time.

A two-year Binghamton University study tracking 242 children’s eye movements toward emotional faces found a measurable attention marker linked to depression risk — one that shifts differently depending on whether a child’s mother has a history of major depressive disorder. Because the study collects family mental-health-history data on minors and assesses inherited depression risk, it required heightened IRB review and parental consent, a genuine human-subjects-ethics angle.

In a Charité-led, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 170+ PTSD patients, the THC medication Dronabinol cut nightmare severity nearly twice as much as placebo over ten weeks, and more than a third of treated patients stopped having nightmares entirely. The trial was funded by Bionorica SE, a pharmaceutical manufacturer with a commercial stake in THC-based products — a genuine conflict-of-interest disclosure story — and its at-home, self-administered dosing design in a trauma-exposed population raises real research-ethics protocol questions.

An 18-year University of Calgary study found CWD prions produced a faint, assay-detected signal in 2 of 18 macaques. Experts genuinely disagree on what that means for human risk — here is the real range of opinion, not a flattened verdict.

A Prothom Alo investigation counted 325 papers linked to Bangladeshi institutions retracted between 2019 and June 2026 — plus named researchers with double-digit counts, a former vice-chancellor’s paper-mill retractions, and AI-generated content findings at Islamic University, Kushtia.

STAT News reported on August 5, 2026 that a child enrolled in a HuidaGene Therapeutics CRISPR trial for Duchenne muscular dystrophy died of ARDS during a severe immune reaction roughly a year before the death was disclosed — a second undisclosed pediatric death in a Chinese gene-editing trial to surface within weeks, this one run under China’s investigator-initiated trial pathway with no independent safety monitoring board.

A 1,154-patient IMPACC cohort study found anellovirus reactivation, not EBV, tracks long-term disability in long COVID — and revises what EBV reactivation actually signals.

Fabricated Op4G/Slice MR survey data reached NIH-funded studies at Northwestern, UNC and U Chicago. One retraction is in; here is what PIs should do.

A 2026 Science and Justice paper argues dry labbing, reporting results for tests never run, is fabrication, not falsification, and deserves its own category.

A July 2026 arXiv study tests five hallucinated-citation checkers and finds none reliable enough to run unsupervised. What each tool gets right, and wrong.

Sage issued an Expression of Concern on a 2021 Journal of Humanistic Psychology paper on 12 March 2026, more than a year after a retraction request. As of August 2026 no final decision has been announced, illustrating how long an EoC can remain open under COPE’s guidance.

Karnataka’s Collegiate Education Department has ordered criminal cases and permanent blacklisting for 249 guest lecturers after universities confirmed the PhD certificates they submitted to secure government college appointments were fake or invalid — a case that turns on when credential verification happens in the hiring sequence.

Police removed 5 researchers from ADA’s June meeting over a Diabetes Care editorial. 200+ members now demand resignations and editorial independence.

Circadian biologist Satchidananda Panda will leave the Salk Institute for Biological Studies on 13 August 2026, ending a 22-year tenure, after an independent investigation into sexual misconduct allegations. Panda denies the allegations; Salk has not released the investigation’s findings.

Kaggle removed a flawed stroke-detection dataset in July 2026 after a copyright complaint — five months after a research-integrity complaint about the same data went nowhere. Three Scientific Reports papers built on it have now been retracted.

The paper claimed 229 countries of data; its cited source lists at most 143 in any year of the study window. The journal’s investigation remains open.

HHS Secretary Kennedy has given Sage Open Medicine until Aug. 15, 2026 to justify a May expression of concern, citing COPE notice-transparency rules. Verified timeline and open questions.

Of 30 papers flagged on PubPeer, four by Reyhan Polat and one by Julide Ergil are now retracted. ESAIC is due to report on its Ergil review by 31 August 2026.

Freie Universität Berlin has awarded its 2026 Rosalind Franklin Prize to Anna Abalkina, co-creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.

A July 2026 SSRN preprint by KAIST researcher Hana Kim finds 401 granted US patents cite retracted scientific papers, and that an audit of a high-impact subset found substantial reliance on the retracted findings in some cases. The paper has not been peer reviewed; here is what it actually found and what it did not.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University has opened a formal investigation, and Nature has posted an editor’s note, after Science and Retraction Watch reported that a 6-year-old girl died days after an experimental base-editing gene therapy overseen by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu — a death, along with the family’s roughly $860,000 contribution to the therapy’s development, that was not disclosed in the resulting Nature paper.

Jason Arday resigned his Cambridge professorship and Jesus College fellowship on 5 August 2026 as the university opened a new inquiry into his qualifications and honorary appointments, alongside a separate academic-misconduct review already underway.

Research Square withdrew three preprints tied to a Nepal-run, 1,000-member research network; ESMO and AHA are now reviewing further submissions.

aiXiv is a new preprint platform, reportedly linked to researchers at the University of Toronto, Oxford, and Tsinghua, that accepts AI-written papers and reviews them using multiple LLM agents instead of human referees. It is a direct counterpoint to arXiv’s recent moves to restrict unchecked AI content — and a new BadScientist study shows LLM reviewers can be fooled by convincing-but-unsound fabricated papers, raising real questions for how research administrators and librarians should treat its output.

COPE’s current retraction guidelines, revised in 2025, explicitly list undisclosed AI-generated content and third-party/paper-mill authorship as grounds for retraction alongside the established criteria. Here is what changed, what stayed the same, and what it means for editors and research-integrity officers.

A BMJ study used a BERT classifier to screen 2.6 million cancer papers, flagging 9.9% as suspected paper-mill output — a scale manual review cannot match.

Clarivate paused Web of Science indexing for six IJS Publishing Group journals after mandatory reporting-guideline citations inflated their impact factor.

A January 2026 Royal Society Open Science paper models why contribution-insensitive authorship norms (alphabetical, senior-last) evolve via a ‘Red King’ dynamic — and shows they measurably discourage collaboration compared to contribution-sensitive norms.

NSF’s own FY2027 budget request confirms its Office of Inspector General has cut roughly 22 positions (24%) since January 2025, lost its investigative-scientist staff, and now refers research-misconduct allegations to grantee institutions instead of investigating them directly — following the departures of Inspector General Allison Lerner and Deputy IG Ken Chason.

A Lancet Correspondence auditing 2.5 million PubMed Central papers found fabricated citations rose from 1-in-2,828 papers in 2023 to 1-in-277 in early 2026 — and over 98% of flagged papers have seen no publisher correction.

RoRI’s PEER REVIEW project wraps up with a June 2026 report: peer review has hit a breaking point, and needs a layered, funder-led reform blueprint.

Northwestern paid $2.3M under HHS-OIG’s Civil Monetary Penalties Law after self-disclosing a Feinberg researcher’s falsified NIH grant data.

EACL 2026’s call for papers confirms that submissions missing a dedicated Limitations section are desk rejected without review — a completeness check, not a quality judgment, that flows from ACL Rolling Review’s shared policy across the ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL submission pipeline.

GAO: 5 top research-funding agencies havent assessed whether security screening risks discriminating against Chinese and Asian-descent scientists.

A Nov. 2025 OpenReview bug exposed ICLR 2026 reviewer identities, enabling bribery and harassment amid separate reports that 21% of reviews were AI-generated.

A February 2026 study surveyed 375 North American accounting researchers on 44 debatable research and authorship practices, mapping where field norms diverge.

Danish researcher Poul Thorsen was extradited from Germany after 15 years as a fugitive and arraigned on 22 federal wire fraud/money laundering counts.

Wolters Kluwer retracted nine transplant papers in July 2026 over unresolved organ-sourcing ethics tied to a 2019 scoping review.

ASTM’s Journal of Testing and Evaluation retracted ~166 papers after a vendor found compromised peer review in guest-edited special issues.

A 2026 Accountability in Research study tracks faculty-student authorship-ethics views and tests whether training plus policy closes the gap.

Dana-Farber paid $15M in Dec. 2025 to settle a DOJ False Claims Act suit over manipulated images in NIH-funded papers, and what it means for grant compliance.

A Walsh Medical Media journal published a commentary under a University at Buffalo researcher’s name without his knowledge, then demanded EUR400, later EUR499, before it would remove the false byline — and ultimately just swapped in a different, unverifiable author name instead. Retraction Watch’s March 2026 report ties the publisher to OMICS International, fined over $50 million by the FTC in 2019.

Zochi (Intology) and Sakana’s AI Scientist each passed real peer review in 2025 — one at ACL, one at an ICLR workshop. What it means for authorship.

University of Melbourne has opened a formal probe into education researcher John Hattie over alleged plagiarism and fabricated AI-style citations.

Frontiers retracted 122 articles after uncovering a ~35-author peer-review collusion network with undisclosed COI and citation manipulation.

A rejected economics paper was resold on Telegram as authorship slots for as little as $55, published, then retracted — a documented paper-mill tactic.

Peer Review Week 2026 runs Sept 14–18 under the theme “Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality.” What it means for reviewers and publishers.

Bibliometric data show single-author systematic reviews climbing steadily since 2000 — including inside Cochrane’s own database — despite guidance calling for independent dual-reviewer screening.

In January 2025, CNR convened Italy’s 1st National Congress on Research Integrity in Rome, producing the Declaration of Rome. CASRAI covers the CNR committee behind it, the Congress, and the national oversight gap the Declaration itself names — including the proposed National Observatory of Research Integrity.

Elsevier expanded Check Integrity to nearly 2,000 journals in March 2026, flagging unauthorized authorship changes and editorial conflicts of interest.

MOST Order No. 24 lists 68 categories of research misconduct across six actor types, part of China’s push to hold institutions accountable.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has ordered universities to investigate retracted papers for misconduct and warned of penalties for looking away.

Canada’s PRCR ran a Feb 17-Apr 17, 2026 consultation proposing to remove any statute of limitations on research misconduct allegations, alongside new rules on anonymous complaints, post-departure accountability, and retaliatory-allegation protections. The comment period has closed; no revised Framework has been published yet.

A second 2026 wave: editors left journals at Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis over volume quotas, publisher control, and open-access disputes.

A D.D.C. court granted summary judgment for HHS on Dec. 12, 2025, upholding ORI’s misconduct findings and 3-year debarment of researcher Ivana Frech.

Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis journals saw mass editor resignations in 2026 over governance, an APC mandate, and referee load.

University of Zurich cleared neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of misconduct, but flagged 7 of 36 studies for image errors he must now retract or correct.

A new dataset, BuyTheBy, quantifies for the first time what paper mills actually charge for authorship: 18,710 ads, prices from roughly $56 to $5,631 for first-author slots, and just 5 of 53 matched published papers retracted so far.

COPE’s new Code of Conduct for members is live, replacing the retired 2024 Core Practices, with a 12-month transition before adherence is mandatory.

South Korea’s National Research Foundation found no research misconduct in Changwon National University president Park Min-won’s papers, closing a three-year plagiarism and duplicate-publication review.

ICML 2026 used hidden PDF watermarks to catch 506 reviewers using AI, desk-rejecting 497 papers tied to 398 of them amid a record 23,918 submissions.

China’s National Health Commission disclosed 28 sanctioned misconduct cases spanning data fabrication, paper trading, and guest authorship.

ICML 2026 study: AI peer-review scores can be gamed by cosmetic ‘paper laundering’ rewrites, a risk authors warn could disadvantage novel work.

UHERO withdrew a Hawaii electricity-policy report in July 2026 after its author found an AI assistant had inverted a key solar-pricing trend from a Berkeley Lab dataset, unverified before publication — a live case study in AI-disclosure and verification gaps.

Wiley is investigating a peer reviewer accused of demanding payment to approve a manuscript at journal Security and Privacy.

UKCORI co-lead Miles Padgett told the UK Reproducibility Network conference the committee has no operations planned beyond 2027, and sketched a scenario for a new centralised UK research-integrity body — not yet a confirmed policy.

Five researchers, including Harvard geneticist George Church, were moved off a Nature Methods byline into acknowledgements amid U.S. scrutiny of China ties.

A Tufts historian’s award-winning book failed an external peer review. The AHA rescinded her prize; she’s no longer at Tufts and disputes the findings.

Rutgers University is investigating whether payments its own units made to Dean Jacqueline Mattis’s writing-retreat company, Easton’s Nook, violate New Jersey conflict-of-interest law. Reported totals range $145K-$155K over about nine years; the probe is ongoing.

Sage retracted 8 papers by ex-editor Yannick Griep for self-reviewed peer review; Radboud separately confirmed data fabrication.

Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof told Lindau 2026 that publishing is unregulated, dismissed COPE as self-serving, and urged a government “FDA for journals.”

A March 2026 ORI finding against former Mount Sinai postdoc Chen-Yeh “George” Ke — for falsified images in a draft manuscript and NIH progress reports — prompted independent image-forensics sleuthing of his broader publication record. That work surfaced an unrelated duplicated image in a 2019 Science Signaling paper, which the journal retracted in July 2026 after finding further discrepancies.

ORI’s final rule revising 42 CFR Part 93 took effect Jan 1, 2025 and applies to allegations received on or after Jan 1, 2026. Here’s exactly what changed.

Retraction Watch’s database has logged over 63,000 retractions. In April 2026 congressional testimony, RW cited a current 0.2% overall retraction rate.

COPE relaunched its paper mills working group in June 2026, citing AI-exploited coordinated misconduct as the driver, with a companion toolkit to its systematic-manipulation guidelines as the group’s first stated deliverable.

A new analysis of the Retraction Watch Database (1997-2026) finds Elsevier has the lowest normalized retraction rate and by far the highest reinstatement rate among ten major publishers — with a caveat from the study’s own author about what that actually measures.

STAT’s April 2026 investigation traces BMJ’s retraction of 7 of 8 papers in a guest-edited Journal of Medical Genetics issue, and the pattern behind it.

NIH’s May 2026 notice explains when AI use in funded research crosses into research misconduct, and what enforcement follows.

The US Office of Research Integrity’s 2026 case summaries include a 15-year debarment of former Rice University professor Ariel Fernandez for fabricating data across 12 published papers — one of ORI’s longest debarment periods on record. Alongside two other 2026 cases, it shows an active federal misconduct-enforcement pipeline continuing to work through cases under the current, recently revised 42 CFR Part 93 framework.

MDPI’s multi-year Proofig AI deal and ASM’s Imagetwin pilot data show AI image-forensics screening becoming standard in publisher editorial workflows.

A Feb. 2026 C&EN investigation found citation cartels inventing fake author identities and misusing APC waivers to sell undetectable citation boosts.

A PNAS study of 5.2M papers found 70% of journals have AI policies, but only ~0.1% of papers actually disclosed AI use.

ICMJE updated its Recommendations in January 2026, adding a new standalone Section V on AI use and a new Section III.L.2 on authors’ access to trial data, plus revisions to sponsor-agreement, misconduct, trial-registration, and funding-disclosure guidance.

NeurIPS 2026 desk-rejected 178 position papers (18.4%) via the Pangram AI detector, no appeal allowed. What is verified, what is disputed, and why it matters.

A New York court reversed a student’s expulsion over a Turnitin false positive, and universities are switching AI-writing detectors off. The 2026 landscape.

NIH terminated its Minority Biomedical Research Support Program and froze diversity supplements in 2025 – what was cut, and where litigation stands now.

Suspect-paper triage at scale needs structured signal escalation. A practical model for moving manuscripts from orange-flag screening to red-flag investigation.

The integrity community’s debate on how to engage with paper mills: confrontation, infiltration, or harm reduction. A look at what is actually working.

ACM is creating its first director of research integrity role to clear a case backlog, joining Springer Nature and Elsevier in treating misconduct investigation as a dedicated, professionalized function rather than a volunteer committee job.

Open peer review is mainstreaming. The signals, identifiers, and attribution mechanisms that make it work — and the gaps that still need closing in 2026.

Role inflation, byline-order confusion, and missing writing roles: the three recurring CRediT failures editors flag, with concrete examples and fixes.

Cabanac’s Problematic Paper Screener, retraction wave, citation cartels, COPE flowcharts, and the United2Act initiative: where the publishing-integrity fight stands.