The researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, first emailed Cureus, an open-access journal Springer Nature acquired in 2022, on August 1. She said she noticed images in the October 2023 paper, "Pediatric Acute Dacryocystitis and Orbital Cellulitis With Concurrent COVID-19 Infection: A Case Report", came from a lecture she posted online and later removed.

"The images used in this article were edited and presented under a fabricated clinical scenario" and had been used without her permission. She also provided what she said were her original images, which were replicated in Figure 1 of the paper, and copied the corresponding author of the article. That author, Ahmed A. Abdelaziz,of Dallah Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, responded and said the researcher’s allegation was correct. First author Saleh Ghulaysi, a medical student at Jazan University in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, was "unable to provide an answer regarding the source of the image".

Graham Parker, director of publishing at Cureus, told the researcher the journal’s investigation would take four to six weeks. On August 15, 2024, Parker in his email saying the journal was "investigating this case carefully and have now retracted the paper due to plagiarism and concerns regarding the authenticity of the case data".