A dean and professor at a public university in Iraq has lost another paper just weeks after we reported he was up to 16 retractions for authorship manipulation, fake peer review and other problems.
Yasser Fakri Mustafa of the University of Mosul was a coauthor of the newly retracted article, a review of how aerosol boxes affected intubation during the COVID‐19 pandemic. He denied wrongdoing.
As stated in the retraction notice, online September 23, the article’s title matched an authorship ad posted on social media on March 9, 2022, eight months before the paper appeared in Taylor & Francis’ Expert Review of Medical Devices.
The advertised work and the published paper also had “significant overlap” in abstracts and keywords, then-sleuth Nick Wise pointed out in a PubPeer post from August 2023 that included a screenshot of the Facebook authorship ad.
In August of this year, Wise, by then a research integrity manager at Taylor & Francis, contacted the authors of the offending article, according to an email we have seen.
“When contacted for an explanation, the corresponding author confirmed the article had been obtained from a concerning source and requested that the article was retracted,” the retraction notice states.
The corresponding author is Trias Mahmudiono of Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya, Indonesia, who has earned two retractions for violation of authorship policies. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Mustafa, who appears last in the author list, shared his correspondence with the publisher, which shows he did not reply to Wise’s email from August until the day after the retraction notice appeared. In his belated reply, he disagreed with Taylor & Francis’ move.
Mustafa told us he would like to see a link to the original Facebook post Wise had found, “rather than a screenshot, which can easily be fabricated.” He added:
Even if we hypothetically assume the PubPeer allegation to be accurate, the purportedly “offered” positions correspond to the second and fourth authors, whereas my position is the eleventh. This clearly indicates that I did not purchase authorship but contributed within the legitimate writing and review process. Since the corresponding author consented to the retraction, it remains plausible that he might have offered those authorship positions without informing the remaining co-authors.
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