The paper with the nonexistent reference, published November 13, 2025 in DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, criticizes platforms for post-publication peer review – and PubPeer specifically – as being vulnerable to “misuse” and “hyper-skepticism.” Five of the paper’s 17 references do not appear to exist, three others have incorrect DOIs or links, and one has been retracted.
The paper claims the phase III clinical trial published October 29, 2025 included over 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, and tested whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack. The results were celebrated in a press release by the journal and appeared in several news outlets, with New Scientist calling the study the "strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself."
Read more: Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study
The small plastic chip etched with channels is a synthetic human organ—and one vision of future drug safety testing. Inside, layers of human liver, epithelial, and immune cells line the tiny conduits, which feed them with bloodlike fluid and remove waste. The chip, made by the Boston-based biotech company Emulate Inc., could one day help researchers and pharmaceutical companies screen out candidate drugs that cause a condition known as drug-induced liver injury (DILI)—one of several types of liver toxicity that together scuttle 22% of all clinical trials.
Researchers who worried that their recently restored National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants could be terminated again because of a recent Supreme Court ruling can breathe a bit easier for the moment. Government lawyers have told NIH staff that the roughly 900 grants on topics such as transgender health, COVID-19, and health disparities should stay in place.
Read more: Legal adviser warns NIH not to kill 900 grants a second time
Editors of academic journals hold an influential position in their field. They have decision-making power over which authors and papers get published, set journal policy, and help shape the trajectory of their discipline. It is also a role in which women are frequently underrepresented.
Read more: Data-driven study finds gender inequality in academic publishing
ChatGPT, the famous artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, can summarize Moby Dick, write computer code, and serve up a recipe for chicken à la king because it has much of the written information on the internet at its silicon fingertips. What if it could do the same for DNA?
Read more: Meet Evo, the DNA-trained AI that creates genomes from scratch
Sign up for a clinical trial of a psychedelic drug and you’re agreeing to a potentially bizarre experience. “All of a sudden, your dead grandma or Satan is in front of you,” says psychiatrist Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Some think this consciousness-altering “trip” underlies the potential benefits of drugs such as psilocybin and LSD, which are under study to treat depression, trauma, chronic pain, and more. But the trip can also be a roadblock to assessing the drugs’ effects, making it near-impossible to conceal who is getting an active substance and who’s been assigned to placebo—a trial strategy called blinding that aims to keep participants’ expectations from skewing their response to a drug.
Read more: Psychedelic drug studies face a potent source of bias: the ‘trip’
Elsevier’s International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published "Origin of the distinct site occupations of H atom in hcp Ti and Zr/Hf" in November 2024. Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: "As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work." One of the authors told us they included the references as a "joke" after reviewers pressured them.
Read more: A "joke": Paper with "completely irrelevant" citations retracted
The first of three themes for next year’s World Conference on Research Integrity will be the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for research integrity. In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.
Read more: Research integrity conference hit with AI-generated abstracts