On August 15, 2025 Retraction Watch wrote about a "rare case report" published in Medicine in which authors claimed they had encountered a case of "ectopia cordis interna" and described an asymptomatic man with his heart located in his abdomen. Sleuths believed the case report plagiarized images from a 2015 satirical paper describing a condition of the same name.

A week later on August 22, 2025, Medicine, published by Wolters Kluwer, retracted the paper and five others – all published this year – with shared authors. The corresponding author on all six studies is Ashraf Basalilah, a researcher at Hadhramaut Hospital in Yemen.

Basalilah shared an August 21 email sent to him by journal editor Megan Larkin in which she notes concerns with the other five case studies, "while not enough on their own to justify retraction, taken with the allegations above, present a pattern of submission and authorship that raises serious questions".

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/09/02/tin-man-syndrome-five-other-case-studies-retracted-following-retraction-watch-coverage/

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now