A former bioinformatics student who operated a paper mill while at the University of Manchester has lost another paper, bringing his total to 11 retractions.
Sameer Quazi had been enrolled in the school’s “PGCert” program in clinical bioinformatics, as Retraction Watch reported in January when the university released a statement saying an investigation found he “was running a paper mill.” The investigation panel had requested the retraction of 10 papers, but didn’t say which ones.
Quazi’s most recent retraction, a 2023 paper on antimicrobial agents, appeared in the MDPI journal Antibiotics. According to the September 12 notice, the journal was “unable to verify the identity, contribution, or affiliations of a number of the authors listed on this manuscript, nor could the origins of the study be confirmed.” The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Maliha Tabassum Rashid and Javid Ahmad Malik, two of the authors listed on the article, said they “were not aware of this submission nor consented to its publication,” according to the notice. The fourth author, Shreelaxmi Gavas, “did not provide a comment on this decision,” the notice states.
Rashid told us she never verified her ORCID ID with the journal before publication, and she requested her name be removed from the original paper, but the journal refused. Neither Malik nor Gavas responded to our request for comment.
A representative from MDPI told us Lukas Koch, a researcher at Free University of Berlin, first alerted the journal to issues with the paper in an April 2024 email to Carlos Franco, an editor at Antibiotics.
Writing under the alias “Carex ternaria” on PubPeer, Koch pointed out the paper contains several “tortured phrases” in the introduction. As we’ve reported in previous cases, tortured phrases often indicate the use of AI and can occur when large language models try to find synonyms for common phrases. Koch wrote that an LLM had probably replaced “sustainability” with “long-term viability” and “mechanistic insights” with “visual percepts into processes [of a chemical reaction].”
In his email to the journal, Koch said the “numerous obvious mistakes” in the figures of the paper “likely represent the greatest novelty and originality to be found in the whole manuscript.” Koch also told Franco he found three instances of potential plagiarism in the article.
In addition to Koch’s concerns, an April 2024 comment on PubPeer by “Desmococcus antarctica” pointed out irrelevant and incorrect references in the paper.
Quazi did not respond to our request for comment. Koch provided a LinkedIn correspondence between the two from last March in which Quazi said some of the structures Koch critiqued “were made by a third party, as my chemistry colleague dropped out.”
“I have no idea how to use that software to make reactions,” Quazi continued in his March 19 message to Koch. After Koch followed up a few days later, Quazi said he planned to correct the issues. Koch later asked Quazi, “What about the plagiarism?” and never heard back.
Quazi’s LinkedIn page states he is the CEO and founder of GenLab Biosolutions Private Limited, which Manchester’s statement said is in India. GenLab’s Facebook page has not posted since 2023, and the website domain is defunct.
His other retractions include two from MDPI journals. The first, for a 2023 Biology study which has been cited 16 times, appeared in June. The second retraction in August was for a 2022 Nutrients paper cited 13 times. Although the notices don’t cite the university investigation, they state the journal “was unable to verify the identity, contribution, or affiliations of a number of the authors listed in this manuscript, nor could the origins of the study be confirmed” in each case – wording nearly verbatim to the most recent notice from Antibiotics.
The six other papers retracted this year appeared in Springer Nature’s Medical Oncology in 2022-2023. The notices for each of the articles cite the university investigation. One 2022 paper on AI in genomic medicine, which Quazi is the sole author on, has been cited 165 times.
The notices for the articles by Quazi alone also say the journal “reviewed this article and discovered instances of nonsensical or incorrect statements, raising questions about both the authorship and validity of the content presented.” In all cases, Quazi did not respond to questions by the journal, according to the notices.
Quazi has published 17 articles. Of the six that have not yet been retracted, three come from Springer Nature journals, including one from Springer Nature’s Nanoscale Research Letters — coauthored by Gavas in 2021 — that has been cited over 600 times. Michael Stacey, head of communications for journals at Springer Nature, confirmed the publisher is looking into these papers.
Aside from the retractions in 2025, Quazi received two retractions last year from Frontiers journals, one for “serious breach of our authorship policies and of publication ethics.”
Update, Oct. 2, 2025: This story was updated to add comment from Springer Nature.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Call me ignorant and/or naive, but how does a publisher legally publish anything under my name without my consent?
It’s not legal, but taking it to court would be painful, and they expect you won’t.
There’s also the issue that many names are far from unique, though name plus affiliation might be a better bet. I am aware of at least three people who have published papers as “MK Kuhner”–I assume the other two are really named that, so I have no ground for complaint that they aren’t me. (I don’t think they’re pretending to be me as they are in wildly different fields.) And heaven help you if you are named Smith or Nguyen. (I had two Nguyens in a large college class whose entire names were the same: they had to put student numbers on their exams.)
How did the papers pass review before publication?
Perhaps because this is work in STEM disciplines. In the more interpretive social sciences and humanities I cannot see how this could be sustained.