The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well.
Last month we reported on allegations that one of the delisted journals, the Medical Journal of Babylon, a publication of the University of Babylon in Hilla, was coercing authors to cite its articles. Citation manipulation is widespread in Iraq and elsewhere, but is considered a form of scientific misconduct.
“The Medical Journal of Babylon was flagged for re-evaluation at the end of September when we received concerns, and because we observed outlier publication performance,” said a spokesperson from Elsevier, which owns Scopus. The publisher marked the journal as delisted in its October update of indexed and delisted titles.
Elsevier also removed from its database the Diyala Journal of Medicine, a publication of the University of Diyala in Baqubah, and the Iraqi Journal of Agricultural Sciences, which is published by the University of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Clarivate has dropped the Iraqi Journal of Agricultural Sciences from its Master Journal List, according to a November 17 update from the company. The title was listed in Web of Science’s Emerging Sources Citation Index.
The “journal was removed because it no longer meets our publicly available quality criteria,” a Clarivate spokesperson told us. “Specific details of our observations and which criteria were failed are shared with the publisher in advance of removal from the MJL. However, we do not share these details with other parties.”
None of the editors-in-chief of the three publications responded to our requests for comment.
The Iraqi government has worked to strengthen the international rankings of its universities and scientific journals, which are increasingly getting indexed in Scopus and, to a lesser extent, Web of Science. But the country allocates little funding to research, and academics say scientific misconduct is widespread, as it is in other parts of the world.
In October, we wrote about an Iraqi university that required students to cite its journals to graduate. We also described how the chief editorial adviser of the Medical Journal of Babylon, Alaa H. Al-Charrakh of the University of Babylon, had asked a prospective author to cite three published papers in the journal, apparently as a condition for accepting the manuscript.
Al-Charrakh told us at the time he did “not remember writing a letter with this content.” But elsewhere he acknowledged asking authors to cite his publication in their papers, as reported on November 6 in a story about the journal’s delisting in the newsletter FraudFactor.
Al-Charrakh lashed out in a November 4 post on Facebook at the anonymous people who alerted Scopus and Retraction Watch to their concerns about academic publishing in Iraq. FraudFactor called the post an “unhinged rant,” with Al-Charrakh referring to his critics as “half-men and quasi-women” and “spiteful people with psychological complexes.” He also said the whistleblowers should be brought to Iraq and held responsible for harming “Iraq’s academic reputation and its prominent position among regional and international countries.”
Al-Charrakh did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
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