Exclusive: Whistleblower fired after raising concerns about journal articles on LinkedIn

A business school in Pakistan has fired a marketing professor after finding he had “damaged the repute” of the university and its scholarly journal, Retraction Watch has learned. 

In a LinkedIn post, Muhammad Mohsin Butt, the now-fired professor, shared a picture of the table of contents of a 2015 issue of Business Review, published by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), in Karachi. The contents listed seven case studies authored by two other professors at the school: 

The two authors are still employed at IBA: Nasir Afghan as an assistant professor of marketing, and Mohammad Asad Ilyas as registrar. 

The journal issue “once existed but was taken back immediately after its release internally,” the school’s inquiry found, although the articles’ authors and a former editor of the journal deny this action constituted retraction. 

Hilal Butt (no relation to Mohsin Butt), chair of IBA’s finance department and the editor of IBA Business Review at the time of the LinkedIn post, replied with a link to the online table of contents for the issue. The webpage showed different article titles and authors, and Hilal Butt wrote that “there is nothing published anything as reported.” 

Afghan, Ilyas, and Hilal Butt subsequently filed complaints against Mohsin Butt with IBA, according to a copy of the grievance committee report obtained by Retraction Watch. Their complaints alleged that Mohsin Butt had posted “factually incorrect information” and publicly damaged “the reputation of the institute and its establishments,” as well as using “inappropriate language and an arrogant attitude.”

Mohsin Butt told the grievance committee he had posted about the issue because “he wanted to expose the corruption of both faculty members and expose the situation at the Business Review,” according to the report. 

After investigating the matter, the committee concluded that the issue of Business Review “was once published but was taken back possibly due to multiple reasons, the major being the one that all seven case studies were authored by two faculty members namely Dr. Nasir Afghan and Dr. Asad Ilyas based on students work.”

The committee also found that Hilal Butt “constantly engaged in concealing the facts” and “took a faulty approach of outright denial of the existence of 10(2) issue of the Business Review that was replaced with the one now available on the journal website.” 

Still, IBA issued a warning letter to Mohsin Butt in June that stated the grievance committee had determined Afghan and Ilyas’ complaints were “valid,” and he had violated the school’s code of conduct. The letter read: 

The Committee has observed that your LinkedIn post has brought an eight-year-old internal matter related to IBA’s Business Review journal to public notice. You have deliberately highlighted only a partial view of the case besides using derogatory language which had simultaneously damaged the repute of IBA, the journal, Dr. Nasir Afghan, and Dr. Asad Ilyas. 

The warning letter directed Mohsin Butt “to write an unconditional apology in a letter and on LinkedIn within 7 working days to Dr. Nasir Afghan and Dr. Asad Ilyas for damaging their reputation publicly.” 

Mohsin Butt did not issue such an apology. On November 2, IBA terminated his employment. The school has not responded to our request for comment. 

In response to our request for comment, Afghan shared a letter from his lawyer to Mohsin Butt accusing him of defamation and threatening to sue if he didn’t apologize. “Matter is now court jurisdiction,” Afghan said. 

Ilyas told us Mohsin Butt had complaints with IBA about subsidized housing, workload, salary, performance appraisal, and other matters.  Because Ilyas’ office denied some of these grievances, “vindictive/vengeful smear/ bullying campaigns are being run to pressure the institute into giving preferential and against policy benefits.”

Mohsin Butt denied he had posted about the journal issue because of his grievances with the school. Ilyas’ “claims look like classical diversions from the core issue,” said Mohsin Butt, who has posted extensively about the case on his LinkedIn account. He initially posted the photo on LinkedIn because “I just thought its [sic] hilarious to share what they did.” 

Ilyas and Hilal Butt disputed that anything inappropriate had happened with the journal issue, and said it had not been retracted because it had never appeared online.  

“Anything that was never added to the literature and or body of knowledge cannot be retracted,” Ilyas told us. He explained: 

The Business Review Special Edition was cases on local businesses of Pakistan, which were submitted to the journal to be published as a separate “special edition”, not part of their regular research publications. The editor-in-chief disagreed with the idea of a special edition and asked to withdraw and cancel/destroy the copies printed. It was never added to any database, archived, uploaded on the website, etc. The editor-in-chief then asked to resubmit for the publication in regular edition to which both prospective authors didn’t agree as the concept was to build a local case repository rather than articles. Additionally, MBA students were recognized in the then-printed copies as well. 

The committee investigating the complaints against Mohsin Butt “probably did not do a real in-depth background check on the reasons behind the cancellation of the special edition business review,” Ilyas wrote. 

He attached what appeared to be a 2016 email from Ishrat Husain, then IBA’s dean and director, directing staff to “withdraw” the issue in which Ilyas and Afghan’s case studies had appeared. Husain has not responded to our request for comment. 

“All the copies of this edition should be returned and destroyed,” stated the email, which also called for the journal’s editor to be replaced and the editorial board “reconstituted.” The email continued: 

Dr. Afghan and Mr. Asad [Ilyas] can submit these case studies to the new Editor who would arrange careful scrutiny by the peer reviewers. In case one, a few or all the cases are accepted for publication they should appear in the Case study section of the regular issue of Business Review. No special edition should be allowed in future as this dilutes the quality of the journal. 

Another email from Husain, sent earlier this year and seen by Retraction Watch, confirmed he “had instructed withdrawal of  all copies of the issue within one hour of its coming out of the Press. Staff  were asked to go from desk to desk of the recipients of the issue and get the copies  back.” 

Hilal Butt, who was editor of Business Review from September 2020 until earlier this year, also told us the 2015 issue with the case studies “had never been issued by the IBA Business Review for the readers, it had never been deposited anywhere, therefore the question of retraction had never been raised.” 

The journal did publish a notice “after this episode,” he said. The notice, which appears on the journal’s general information page, states: 

Please be informed that IBA Business Review has never released or archived any Case Studies/SPECIAL EDITION. All officially released volumes and issues of the journal since its inception in 2006 are accessible at https://ir.iba.edu.pk/businessreview, archived at Portico, and indexed in IDEAS, REPEC, JEL, EBSCO, DOAJ, and CrossRef.

Hilal Butt further elaborated on his view of what constitutes a retraction: 

Now I need not to remind someone from the retraction watch that what retraction entails. But let me give my impression. In the world of academic publications/literature, the term Retraction refers to the process of correction of literature in the event a particular intellectual contribution (published material) is found to be plagued with some form of academic dishonesty, such as forgery, plagiarism and/or other forms of data manipulation etc. This Retraction can only be exercised if the intellectual contribution in question has already become part of the body of knowledge. This can only happen if a particular intellectual contribution is ever deposited to any online repository. If it is not deposited to any online repository, it cannot, therefore, be a part of the literature because it is not available in the public domain. Hence, it cannot be archived, it cannot be cited and would obviously not have any readership base. If something is not part of the literature, then how can a process of Retraction be initiated to correct it from the literature? Retraction, as per COPE, follows a prescribed procedure. First of all, the whole issue cannot be retracted (each case study or a paper has to be retracted on an individual basis). Secondly, Retraction necessitates an editor’s note. Thirdly, there have to be grounds to establish the case of retraction (as part of the formal retraction procedure) – such as forgery, plagiarism etc.

Given what we have learned about this case, we have added the retractions to The Retraction Watch Database.

Update, 2100 UTC: We received a response to this post from S. Akbar Zaidi, executive director of the IBA.

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