Energy researcher up to 18 retractions

A researcher in Malaysia is up to 18 retractions, for faked peer review and a host of other sins.

We first wrote about Shahaboddin Shamshirband, of the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, in early 2017, because Elsevier had pulled, or planned to pull, nine of his papers. Jeffrey Beall, known for his list of possible predatory publishers, had raised questions about duplication by Shamshirband in 2016 on his now-defunct blog, ScholarlyOA.

The most recent retraction for Shamshirband was for “Soft computing methodologies for estimation of energy consumption in buildings with different envelope parameters,” a 2016 paper in Energy Efficiency. Here’s the notice:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article (Naji et al. 2016a) because validity of the content of this article cannot be verified. This article showed evidence of substantial text overlap (most notably with the articles cited (Naji et al. 2014, 2016b; Akib et al. 2015)), peer review and authorship manipulation. None of the authors agree to this retraction.

Shamshirband’s 18 retractions appear in journals including Climate Dynamics, Applied Intelligence, and Flow Measurement and Instrumentation. Most have been cited fewer than 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, but one has been cited 45 times.

He did not respond to a request for comment.

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