A professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in Iraq has been steadily racking up retractions since 2022, with reasons ranging from authorship manipulation to irrelevant citations, peer review-by-author and not providing study data upon request.
Yasser Fakri Mustafa, who is also dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Mosul and editor-in-chief of the Iraqi Journal of Pharmacy, now has at least 16 retractions to his name, and more are likely to follow. One publisher told us it is actively investigating Mustafa’s work, and 81 of his more than 500 papers have been flagged on PubPeer.
From 2008 to 2019, Mustafa published no more than one or two articles a year, and often he had no output at all, according to the research database Dimensions. Then his output rose sharply, peaking at 120 in 2022, according to Dimensions. That same year, however, the researcher’s name appeared in a blog post by Nick Wise and Alexander Magazinov about authorship-for-sale networks. The two sleuths had found several papers by Mustafa and a slew of international coauthors that matched authorship ads on various websites, including that of a Russia-linked paper mill in Latvia, as they documented on PubPeer.
An online list of other works that match ads found on the Latvian paper mill’s website includes several articles by Mustafa that have not been retracted.
At least one of the dean’s retractions is explicitly linked to a PubPeer post that shows a Facebook ad selling authorship of the paper. The retraction notice states the study was submitted by a single author in Iran and that the other authors, including Mustafa, were added during a revision of the manuscript.
Mustafa’s coauthors on the retracted papers include at least two former Iraqi university presidents. One of them, Shafik Shaker Shafik, whose article was pulled in 2023 for authorship and peer-review manipulation, now heads the country’s Scientific Research Commission, an organ under the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
In response to our questions, Mustafa focused on three retractions in Frontiers journals that provided little detail beyond stating that an investigation had found a “serious breach of our authorship policies and of publication ethics.”
“In all three cases, the retractions were due to administrative and procedural concerns related to author order and not due to any academic misconduct, data falsification, plagiarism, or ethical violations,” Mustafa told us. “The research methodologies, results, and conclusions remain valid and scientifically sound.”
Mustafa’s statements echoed assertions by Haider Al-Aboudi, spokesperson for Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, who said on a recent news program (in Arabic) the University of Mosul’s retractions were for “procedural reasons” rather than “issues of research integrity or ethics.” Of the 19 retractions the institution has earned since 2022, all but three are Mustafa’s, according to the Retraction Watch Database.
Citing confidentiality, Frontiers would not share information about the nature of the ethics and authorship violations it had found. But a spokesperson told us, “When investigations raise concerns, we engage with authors as well as their institutions and share relevant findings to support further review or action.”
Mustafa’s other retractions – in journals from publishers such as Elsevier, MDPI, Wiley, Springer Nature and Taylor & Francis – offer much more detail.
An Elsevier journal, for instance, described how, “In addition to manipulation of the list of authors, acceptance of this article was partly based upon the positive advice made by a reviewer that had conflict of interest. That reviewer contributed substantively to the preparation of both the original and revised manuscripts without disclosing their involvement to the editor.”
And a Springer Nature journal noted “the authors have not provided the underlying data on the editor’s request. Additionally, the authors have not been able to provide documentation that ethical approval was obtained prior to commencing this study. The ethics approval number as stated in this article appears to be identical to an ethics approval number in a previously published article by some of the same authors.”
Mustafa declined to comment on these retractions, and his institution did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
But an academic at the institution told us the problems with Mustafa’s work had caused concern among several of his colleagues. “The damage to the university of Mosul is evident,” said the academic, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Frontiers told us it had concluded its investigation into Mustafa’s papers, but Taylor & Francis said it was “independently investigating concerns raised about a number of articles” by the dean.
Despite his growing number of retractions, journals continue to publish Mustafa’s papers at a brisk clip. More than 20 of his articles have appeared in Springer Nature journals since the company’s latest retraction of one of his works on March 6, for example.
We asked Springer Nature whether it was currently investigating Mustafa’s work and how it deals with authors who have had several articles retracted for serious ethics breaches. The publisher said it would get back to us, but after two weeks still has not provided comments.
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