Nursing Journal Retracts Evidence-Based Practice Study Over Unverifiable References

A study that promised to illuminate how nurse managers champion evidence-based practice in acute care hospitals has been formally retracted, after the editors of BMC Nursing concluded that its scholarly foundations could not be trusted. The retraction notice, published as an open-access note in the journal, states plainly that the Editor has lost confidence in the data and conclusions of the article, which originally appeared in March 2025 under the title Leading evidence-based practice: nurse managers’ strategies for knowledge utilisation in acute care settings. The case offers a rare public window into the technical machinery of research integrity, and into how even a paper on the responsible use of evidence can itself fall victim to failures of evidence.

The problems identified by the editors centre on the article’s reference list, the apparatus that connects any piece of scholarship to the wider body of knowledge it claims to build upon. According to the retraction note, multiple references were found to be incorrect or unverifiable, specifically those numbered 13, 7, 6, 4, 15 and 53. In plain terms, these citations either pointed to sources that did not match what the text claimed, or could not be traced to any verifiable publication at all. For a paper whose entire subject was the careful appraisal and utilisation of evidence in clinical settings, the irony is difficult to miss.

More serious still, the editors reported that several cited works could not be confirmed as existing publications at all. References 5, 12, 16, 47 and 48 fell into this category, raising the possibility that they were fabricated, a form of citation fraud that has become one of the most corrosive problems in modern scholarly publishing. In addition, the notice flags duplication: references 9 and 11 appear to be duplicates of references 49 and 53 respectively, an error pattern that suggests the bibliography was assembled without adequate verification or cross-checking.

Retractions of this kind follow a well-defined procedural pathway. When concerns about a published article surface, whether through reader complaints, post-publication scrutiny, or internal editorial review, the journal typically investigates with input from the authors and their institutions. If the concerns prove substantive and cannot be resolved, the editor may issue a retraction notice, which is permanently linked to the original article and indexed in bibliographic databases. The original paper remains online, but it is watermarked and cross-linked to the notice so that readers encountering it later understand its status. In this case, the retraction note is itself the version of record now attached to the study’s digital object identifier.

The author responses, or lack of them, form a notable part of the record. According to the notice, Ukpai Eze disagrees with the retraction, while David Agom did not explicitly state whether or not they agree with it. None of the remaining authors responded to correspondence from the publisher about the retraction. This pattern, partial dissent combined with widespread silence, is not unusual in retraction cases, but it complicates the narrative. Disagreement from one author does not overturn an editorial decision, yet it signals that the underlying facts may be contested within the authorship itself, and it leaves readers with an incomplete account of how the problematic references came to be in the manuscript.

The original study sat at the intersection of two consequential fields: nursing management and knowledge translation. Evidence-based practice, the discipline of grounding clinical decisions in the best available research rather than in tradition or habit, depends heavily on leaders who can find, appraise and deploy research findings within busy hospital environments. Nurse managers in acute care settings are often the practical gatekeepers of this process. They decide which guidelines gain traction on the ward, which training programmes receive time and resources, and whether research findings actually change bedside practice. A study describing their strategies for knowledge utilisation would, if reliable, be of genuine interest to hospital administrators, nursing educators and health policy researchers alike.

That is precisely why reference integrity matters so much in a paper of this kind. A qualitative or mixed-methods study of management practice does not stand alone; it interprets its findings through the lens of prior literature on organisational behaviour, knowledge management and clinical leadership. If the citations anchoring that literature are wrong, invented, or duplicated, the interpretive framework collapses. Readers cannot check the intellectual lineage of the claims. Systematic reviewers, who rely on accurate reference lists to map research landscapes, may be misled into counting phantom publications as real evidence. In fields that directly inform patient care, such distortions carry a cost beyond academia.

The case also illustrates the technical standards that journals now apply when auditing bibliographies. Verification typically involves checking each citation against publisher databases, digital object identifier registries and indexing services such as PubMed and Crossref. A citation that resolves to no matching title, author combination or journal is flagged as unverifiable. Duplicated references, where the same work appears under two different entries, are detected through title and author matching. Incorrect references, where the cited source exists but does not support the claim attributed to it, require closer reading. The granularity of the BMC Nursing notice, citing specific reference numbers by category, reflects this systematic audit and serves as a public accounting of what was found.

For the wider research community, the episode is a reminder that the credibility of a paper rests on layers of verification that most readers never see. Peer review, however rigorous, does not always include exhaustive reference checking, and the sheer volume of global publishing has strained the capacity of editorial offices to catch every anomaly. Automated screening tools, reference-matching software and post-publication scrutiny have all grown in importance as complements to traditional review. Retraction, once seen as a catastrophic rarity, is now understood as a routine corrective mechanism, a sign that the system’s error-detection is functioning rather than that science itself is failing.

What remains after the retraction is a cautionary document. The original article, published in March 2025, is now permanently linked to a notice that dismantles its evidentiary scaffolding, and the journal’s stated loss of confidence in its data and conclusions stands as the authoritative record. For nursing researchers, the lesson is procedural: every citation must be verified against the actual source, and authorship carries responsibility for the bibliography as much as for the findings. For clinicians and managers who might have drawn on the study to shape evidence-based practice initiatives, the retraction is a signal to look elsewhere for guidance. And for readers of science journalism, it is a demonstration that the machinery of correction, slow and unglamorous as it is, does eventually turn, even when the subject of the failed paper is the proper handling of evidence itself.

Subject of Research: Retraction of a nursing management study on evidence-based practice due to unverifiable references

Article Title: Retraction Note: Leading evidence-based practice: nurse managers’ strategies for knowledge utilisation in acute care settings

Article References: Ominyi, J., Nwedu, A., Agom, D., & Eze, U. (2026). Retraction Note: Leading evidence-based practice: nurse managers’ strategies for knowledge utilisation in acute care settings. BMC Nursing, 25(1), Article 883. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05399-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05399-w

Keywords: retraction, BMC Nursing, evidence-based practice, nurse managers, research integrity, citation fraud, reference verification, acute care, knowledge utilisation, nursing research, publishing ethics, Springer Nature