The journal Poultry Science has retracted two papers for authorship issues.
The first author on both articles was Sajid Umar, of the Arid Agriculture University, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, who now has lost at least four papers for similar reasons.
One article, from 2016, was titled “Synergistic effects of thymoquinone and curcumin on immune response and anti-viral activity against avian influenza virus (H9N2) in turkeys.” According to the retraction notice:
The authors retract the above paper due to: 1) conflict of interest among the authors; and 2) addition of coauthor Dr. Muhammad Younus without his knowledge or permission. The authors apologize for these two grave mistakes.
The second article, “Mycoplasma synoviae vaccine modifies virus shedding and immune responses of avian influenza (H9N2) infection in commercial layers,” carries the same statement.
Our email to Umar bounced back as undeliverable. Younus, of the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, has published frequently with Umar in the past without retractions. He told us:
I have come to know about these articles through some of my Junior colleagues and not through these researchers. I have no interaction with these researchers in the past, but a little … interaction with Mr. Sajid Umar because he graduated from our institution, but regarding these articles, I have no interaction with him and my name in these articles has been added without my knowledge, permission and consent. When I have come to know about these articles, I have also seen that Mr. Sajid Umar was corresponding author in these articles. That’s why I called Mr. Sajid Umar and asked him why my name had been added in these articles without my knowledge, permission and consent? I protested and directed him to delete my name from these papers or at-least these articles may be retracted with the retraction statement that Dr. Muhammad Younus is not co-author in these articles. That’s why he sent emails to the Journal that I am not co-author in these articles. Thus, I have brought this issue not directly, but indirectly in the kind notice of the Journal through Mr. Sajid Umar as he was the corresponding author.
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First red flag: curcumin
“Grave mistakes”? These are paltry issues.
Here is a current email address for Sajid Umar. [email protected]
He has suffered a bit from changing email address limiting his ability to explain himself.
Dr. Muhammad Younus may of been unaware of his attributed authorship in the two articles with S. Umar but he is also an author of another retracted article in the database without S. Umar. See Microbial path. 126:407 (2019).
These authors probably use plagiarism detection software to make sure the final article is not detected as plagiarism. (There is software that will do the re-write of a paragraph/sentence but I don’t know it they use this). Indeed another author in this group when challenged offered “For the other issue like similarity, actually, this was happened due to a fault in our plagiarism checking software and we did not do this deliberately. ” and shows that their understanding of plagiarism is stealing the words. I think it is also stealing the ideas without acknowledgement.
Finally a retraction without an explanation from the author(s) or a comment from the editor(s) is only half a retraction. I originally noticed that the S. Umar article on M. synoviae vaccine interaction with Avian Influenza had one paragraph that was a non-sense (CJ Morrow Letter to the editor Poult Sci. 2020 Jan;99(1):1.) and I recognized it as being a concatenation of two paragraphs from a paper I co-authored (where it did make sense). This would not be detected by plagiarism screening software. It left me wondering if the work described in the original article was ever performed.
This outbreak in Pakistan is more extensive and watch more retractions from these authors appear over the following months.