Engineering professor up to nine retractions for image problems

An engineering researcher is up to nine retractions for image issues, having lost eight papers in the last month.

Yashvir Singh, of India’s Graphic Era University — ironically enough, given the reasons for the retractions —  is the first author on seven of the papers, and second author on the eighth, which appeared between 2016 and 2019.  All eight articles were published in journals owned by Taylor & Francis, and have been cited more than 80 times in total, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

Issues with the 2017 paper “Effect of load on friction and wear characteristics of Jatropha oil bio-lubricants,” in Biofuels were flagged in a post on PubPeer last July.  

Biofuels issued this notice on January 18: 

We, the Editor and Publishers of Biofuels have retracted the following article:

Yashvir Singh, Amneesh Singla, Anshul Kumar Singh & Avani Kumar Upadhyay (2018) Tribological characterization of Pongamia pinnata oil blended bio-lubricant, Biofuels, 9:4, 523–530, DOI: 10.1080/17597269.2017.1292017

This article has been retracted due to image duplication and manipulation.

An investigation was conducted, and “worn surface image” panels in Figure 7 were found to be published in two other articles. What the images are said to represent varies by article and the authors have not been able to provide the original images. Thus, the conclusions of the present article cannot be verified.

The two other articles include:

1.Yashvir Singh, Rajnish Garg & Ajay Kumar (2016) Tribological behavior of pongamia oil as a lubricant additive, Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 38:16, 2406–2412, DOI: 10.1080/15567036.2015.1089341 (the entirety of Figure 6 is identical to Figure 7 of this retracted article)

2. Yashvir Singh, Rajnish Garg & Suresh Kumar (2017) Effect of load on friction and wear characteristics of Jatropha oil bio-lubricants, Biofuels, 8:1, 125–133, DOI: 10.1080/17597269.2016.1215065 (Figure 8(a) 150 N and 8(d) 150 N are the same, after resizing (stretching), as Figure 7(c) and 7(d) of this retracted article, respectively)

The authors do not agree with the retraction.

Singh’s first retraction appeared in August of last year in Process Safety and Environmental Protection, an Elsevier title.

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