Earlier this year, Marc Halushka, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio,  came across a review titled simply "MicroRNA" an unusually short title in a big field. Looking deeper into the review, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2018, Halushka found it had been cited more than 2,000 times. When searching "microRNA" on Google Scholar, the review with that single term as its title is the first result. Halushka suspects when people "who know nothing about microRNAs because they are just in the paper mill business" need to cite a review on the topic, they just use the top search result.

Such a scenario is a strong possibility. An analysis by David Robert Grimes, one of Retraction Watch’s first Sleuths in Residence, found that of the 2,046 papers citing the “MicroRNA” review in Elsevier’s Scopus database, 18 of them have been retracted. Many of the retraction notices describe recycled data and peer review concerns as reasons for the decision, which publishers often use to suggest paper mill activity.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/09/17/why-has-this-microrna-review-paper-been-cited-more-than-2000-times/

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now