A dean at an Australian university sought to correct some of his papers. He received a retraction instead.
We wrote last year about Marcel Dinger, dean of science at the University of Sydney, who was a coauthor on five papers with multiple references that had been retracted. In May 2024, Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan, had flagged the papers on PubPeer for “references of questionable reliability.” Magazinov credited the Problematic Paper Screener with helping him find them.
Dinger told us at the time he intended to work with editors to determine whether the five papers should be corrected or retracted.
This May, one of the papers, published in 2021 in The Journal of Drug Targeting, was retracted – with a statement that the authors didn’t agree with the decision. The article has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
We followed up with Dinger, who told us he and his coauthors had reached out to the journal with a correction note. “As the conclusions of the paper were not impacted by the retracted citations, the authors felt that a corrigendum was an appropriate measure to uphold the integrity of the scholarly record,” Dinger said.
This correction note coincided with the editorial team and publisher’s investigation, which a Taylor & Francis spokesperson told us “was prompted by concerns, raised initially by third parties and subsequently by one of the authors, regarding references cited in the review article which had later been retracted.”
The investigation “identified enough concern about the relevance and accuracy of other references that we and the Editorial Team no longer had confidence in the content presented and concluded that a retraction was required,” the spokesperson said.
But Dinger told us “the journal did not supply the authors with any specific information regarding the remaining concern on the ‘relevance and accuracy of some other references’ cited in the publication, so we were unable to assess the Editorial Team and Publisher’s basis for retraction.”
One of the other flagged papers received a lengthy correction in December, which the authors agreed with. Dinger told us he “contacted the associated journals in June last year with corrigendums,” but the other three papers remain unmarked.
Mohammad Taheri, a coauthor on all five of the papers, said in an interview he also disagreed with the retraction because “there [were] no irrelevant citation[s].” Taheri has nearly 100 papers with comments on PubPeer. He has responded to many of these comments, including on the recent retraction.
Dinger declined to comment when asked about his collaboration with Taheri and if he knew about the large number of his papers on PubPeer. He coauthored 15 papers with him from 2020 to 2022 but has not published with him since.
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