Research integrity and misconduct

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.