A high-ranking official at Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research has earned six retractions over the past two years for issues including citation stuffing and “suspicious” authorship changes after articles were accepted.
Both practices are warning signs of a paper mill at play. At least two of the official’s retracted works appeared in a special issue edited by an academic who has been accused of being part of authorship-for-sale networks.
But Hayder Abed Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, who was a corresponding author on two of the articles and a coauthor on the rest, told us the “retractions were not due to fabricated results or research misconduct on my part.” He added that “as a public figure currently involved in national projects,” he had been the target of “politically motivated campaigns aimed at damaging my reputation.”
The six retracted papers were published in 2022 in Fuel, the Journal of Energy Storage and Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements, three Elsevier titles marred by paper mill products. That same year, scientific sleuth Alexander Magazinov began flagging the articles on PubPeer for having irrelevant citations.
In one case, Magazinov highlighted a passage in a paper whose corresponding author was Dhahad: “The use of numerical methods is common among researchers in various fields [55–59],” the paper stated. “Numerical methods have greatly contributed to the spread of studies among researchers [60–64].”
According to the sleuth, the two sentences served no other purpose than introducing extraneous citations, eight of which were to papers by Yu-Ming Chu, a highly cited researcher at Huzhou University in China. Chu has earned several retractions for fake peer review and suspicious authorship changes.
That paper, along with a second on which Dhahad was one of two corresponding authors, appeared in a special issue in the Journal of Energy Storage that was later investigated due to concerns “about the integrity and rigor of the peer-review process.” As we reported in 2023, Magazinov has linked one of the guest editors of the special issue, Iranian scientist Masoud Afrand, to a paper mill operation in relation to another special issue that cited him more than 130 times. Magazinov has also criticized the Journal of Energy Storage’s special issue in a blog post.
The article’s retraction notice, from July 2024, referenced Magazinov’s PubPeer comments. It also stated the editor-in-chief of the journal had “discovered suspicious changes in authorship between the original submission and the revised version of this paper,” for which the authors could not offer a satisfactory explanation.
Dhahad called the journal’s decision to pull his paper “an excellent example of the unfair and illogical retraction of scientific work” and also disputed Magazinov’s allegations on PubPeer. The research cited in the two sentences Magazinov highlighted were “well-established works in numerical and computational methods that form the foundation of applied engineering simulations,” Dhahad said. “Their inclusion is both logical and necessary, as they provide the theoretical framework, mathematical justification, and validation approaches for the numerical simulations applied in our study.”
Dhahad offered detailed comments on the relevance of each of the references. In a subsequent email to us, he also said the author changes had been “processed transparently through Elsevier’s Editorial Manager system” and “reflected a responsible adjustment to ensure that the final list of authors accurately represented those who intellectually and practically contributed to the research outcomes.”
“Until now, we have not been given any clear explanation” for the retraction, the deputy minister added. “It is also important to emphasize that the paper underwent a rigorous peer-review process, as shown in the attached reviewers’ email below, and no objections were raised regarding this section or these citations during the evaluation.”
But the peer review process may have been compromised. A retraction notice for the first paper in the special issue, written by a researcher in Saudi Arabia, stated “the acceptance of this article was based upon the positive advice of reviewer reports from reviewers who were closely linked to the Guest Editors. The citations included in the paper benefited some of the Guest Editors, namely Nader Karimi [9 citations] and Masoud Afrand [7 citations].”
An email from the journal Dhahad forwarded to us suggests the same could be true of his paper: One reviewer quoted in the correspondence requested the addition of five references, three of which had Afrand’s name in the author list (Afrand’s frequent coauthor Arash Karimipour was an author of all five). Two of the references were added to the manuscript.
Dhahad’s paper also contained several references to work by another top-cited author in China, Changhe Li of Qingdao University of Technology, whose research is often cited together with Chu’s. Li and Dhahad were co-corresponding authors on another retracted paper in the Journal of Energy Storage’s problematic special issue.
In a comment on one of our stories about Afrand, sleuth Maarten van Kampen called Li a “canary in a coalmine … to detect citation plantations.” According to the sleuth, references to Li’s work frequently appear out of context and in papers containing tortured phrases, a sign authors may have used paraphrasing software to camouflage plagiarized content.
Dhahad’s other retractions are related to similar problems. A notice in Fuel from August, for instance, stated the authors had added 35 references after their original submission and changed the author list without telling editors. That paper also cited Li’s work heavily, as Magazinov pointed out on PubPeer, and the journal agreed the inappropriate references “could amount to potential citation stuffing to the benefit of certain researchers.”
Magazinov told us the frequent, out-of-context citations to Li’s work suggest Dhahad’s papers originated from Iranian paper mills. “Iraqi ’scholars’ do a lot of article shopping in one neighboring country,” Magazinov said, referring to Iran.
In addition to the retracted papers, dozens of the deputy minister’s other articles have also been flagged on PubPeer.
Dhahad, who also is a professor and vice president for scientific affairs and higher education studies at the University of Technology in Baghdad, said the retracted “works were produced within collaborative research teams, and I was not solely responsible for all aspects of authorship or submission. In some cases, changes or issues arose at the level of co-authors or during the journal process itself.”
His international collaborations – with authors from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, India and Tunisia – began in 2019, Dhahad said, when he and Hadi Ghaebi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Mohaghegh Ardabili in Iran, established a “research partnership” between their two institutions. The efforts later “grew into a multinational research team,” Dhahad told us. Several of Ghaebi’s works have been flagged on PubPeer for containing allegedly irrelevant citations.
Dhahad emphasized that research integrity is “one of our primary goals in the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq” and highlighted the ministry’s work to prevent the country’s scholars from publishing in predatory journals.
Corruption reportedly is rampant in Iraq’s higher education system. Last month, we wrote about a dean at a university there who had been linked to paper mills and a physics professor who orchestrated a publishing scheme to defraud junior scientists of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Insiders say the problems are rooted in a tough dilemma facing the struggling nation’s researchers: On one hand, the country spends critically little on research, with an R&D expenditure of just 0.04 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank. On the other, master’s and Ph.D. students are required to publish articles in indexed journals to obtain their degrees.
“You are pushing those people to fake research,” said an Iraqi university scholar who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. “They can’t collect data with no money.”
Another academic, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed, telling us, “the scientific research budget is 0.0%, yet Iraqi research output appears explosive. Most legitimate research is funded out of academics’ and students’ own pockets, while the rest consists of fake publications from papermillers and other falsifications.”
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It’s deeply ironic that Dhahad, as deputy minister, significantly raised publication requirements for researcher promotions and student graduations while providing zero funding!
This shameful policy essentially forces Iraqi academics into the arms of paper mills, creating the very problem he now claims to be fighting.
You can’t demand world-class research output while offering nothing but empty pockets.
Ah yes, the classic ‘politically motivated attack’ defense, right up there with ‘the dog ate my homework.’ Nothing says research integrity quite like a Higher Education & Scientific Research deputy minister with six retractions claiming those random citations to Chinese paper mill authors were ‘theoretically necessary.
He is full professor as per his GS profile. Wow! Shameful.