A retracted paper, re-reviewed.
In 2025 the Journal of Medical Ethics published “Relational accountability in AI-driven pharmaceutical practices: an ethics approach to bias, inequity and structural harm” (doi:10.1136/jme-2025-110913). In 2026 the journal retracted it — in part because it “includes references that do not exist.” We ran the published manuscript through a standard PeerReviewAI peer review to see what automated verification catches.
What happened.
The paper was received 11 March 2025, accepted 29 May 2025, and published 9 September 2025. It applied a “relational accountability” ethics framework to AI in pharmaceutical practice.
In 2026 the journal retracted it. The retraction notice states:
“The article is retracted due to evidence of peer review manipulation, and because it includes references that do not exist. This results from undeclared AI use with inadequate oversight by the author.”
“The author used generative AI to identify and understand referenced sources. They did not adequately verify these references prior to submission.”
On 7 July 2026 — after the retraction — we ran the published manuscript through PeerReviewAI’s standard Peer Review — as offered at the time — with no special prompting. This page reports the review’s reference-verification results — the same ground the journal’s notice raised — and nothing beyond them. Every check is independently reproducible against PubMed and Crossref, which is the point. Manuscripts reviewed on PeerReviewAI are processed under Zero Data Retention; this one is public record.
These results are a historical artifact of review engine v1.1.0 (7 July 2026); the current product may differ. Published case-study results are never silently updated.
The retraction grounds, mapped to the review.
The reference audit.
“Unverified” means no matching record was found in PubMed or Crossref. Books and grey literature can legitimately resist indexing — the review flags them for human checking rather than alleging fabrication. The journal’s own investigation concluded that several references did not exist.
What automated review cannot catch.
The retraction also cites evidence of peer review manipulation — process fraud that is invisible in any manuscript. No automated tool catches that, and ours doesn’t claim to. But the reference problems were sitting in the manuscript the whole time, checkable by machine in minutes.
This page quotes the journal’s public retraction notice and reports machine-reproducible reference checks against public databases (PubMed, Crossref); we make no claims beyond either. AI-generated analysis — intended to support, not replace, expert peer review.