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The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation.
Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Astana, has written or coauthored 480 papers indexed on Scopus, and one analysis puts him as the third most cited researcher in Kazakhstan. His prolific publication record has been linked to Russian paper mills, though those claims are unverified. Zdorovets has defended his work in a series of online posts, arguing the imaging similarities come from technical issues and that his own analyses prove image manipulation did not occur. He did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.
The latest retraction for Zdorovets came last month when Crystallography Reports retracted a study containing electron microscope images “highly similar” to those published a year earlier in a now-retracted paper in the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry by a similar group of authors. Both papers also included images that closely resemble ones Zdorovets and his colleagues presented at a nanomaterials conference in Ukraine in 2017. In each instance, the images were meant to be showing different materials.
According to many of the retraction notices, Zdorovets’ papers have noise in the data that appears unusually similar across several figures. In 2023, a PubPeer commenter who pointed out suspicious patterns in a 2017 Materials Research Express paper triggered a lengthy exchange with IOP Publishing, the journal’s publisher, which conducted three separate investigations into the paper. Initially, IOP said their subject-matter expert consultant found no sign of “intentional alteration,” and the company decided to take no action.
Commenters pushed back, and in June 2024, the publisher sought opinions from three more experts, one whom they described as an “absolute expert in this area.” The experts concluded the raw data submitted by the authors showed “distinct backgrounds.” The publisher again decided not to act.
In September 2024, Maarten Van Kampen, a data sleuth in the Netherlands, weighed in on the PubPeer thread, agreeing that the background noise looked identical and also pointing out similarities between data in the 2017 paper and another since-retracted paper by a similar group of authors, including Zdorovets, in 2018.
Finally, this June, IOP Publishing acknowledged that their experts had “failed to compare the raw data provided by the authors with the published data,” despite earlier claims to the contrary. The journal retracted the article for containing identical background noise in the X-ray diffractions, which they said “can be indicative of image manipulation.” They also noted the raw data the authors provided didn’t match the paper’s data, meaning they could find “no evidence of the experiments being undertaken.”
Asked about the investigations, Kim Eggleton, IOP Publishing’s head of peer review and research integrity, said the first set of experts had been given raw data in a different file format than the later group of experts. The newer group also included a specialist in X-ray diffraction and two of the PubPeer commenters who first raised concerns. They had requested the specific format “so they could assess the concerns in greater depth,” she said.
In August this year, the paper’s second author, Marat Kaikanov, posted in the PubPeer thread that he hoped his colleagues responsible for the X-ray measurements would “be able to confirm the accuracy” of the results. Kaikanov told us he couldn’t evaluate the flagged data firsthand because those experiments were outside his area of responsibility, but said his own contribution “was completed diligently and in full.”
While he didn’t weigh in on that PubPeer exchange, Zdorovets has engaged with some other criticisms on the platform, where 85 papers he coauthored are flagged. In one detailed response, he dismissed an allegation the background noise in X-ray diffraction images were duplicated.
“We were puzzled by such an unexpected question,” he wrote, “since there is no and cannot be any reasonable sense to somehow artificially change the background on the spectra mentioned in the question.” In his comments on PubPeer, he says he analyzed both spectra and “can firmly say that they are not duplicated in any part,” though he acknowledged a “high degree of similarity” in the backgrounds. His explanation is that the samples were so thin that the instrument recorded signals from the table beneath them, resulting in the resemblances — a claim which Van Kampen, the Dutch data sleuth, calls “unhinged.”
“As sleuths we get gray hair from these arguments,” Van Kampen told Retraction Watch, adding that persistent denial helps delay or even prevent retractions. He referred to a COSIG guide that states, “No matter what, no two XRD patterns will feature the same noise pattern, even if they are collected from the same sample on the same instrument with the same settings.”
The 2018 paper, published in Journal of Nanoparticle Research, was retracted in December 2024 because of seemingly identical background noise in two figures. When the journal asked the authors for the original data, they found what was provided “differs substantially” from what had been published, according to the notice.
In PubPeer comments made after the retraction, Zdorovets expressed frustration over a lack of “scientifically-grounded counter arguments” and called the accusations “unfounded.” He said he had provided the original data to the journal and said there was “no conflict” between the submitted files and the figures in the article. “We strongly disagree with the decision to retract,” he wrote.
Zdorovets has defended his work in reports he posted on his personal ResearchGate, including what he says is a mathematical analysis of the data in three retracted papers showing no duplications. His coauthors have argued that similarities come from reduced image quality and say critics misunderstood how X-ray diffraction data were processed, claiming similarities arose from how the figures were viewed or plotted.
In a statement to Retraction Watch, a researcher who has collaborated with Zdorovets and wished to remain anonymous said ”neither I nor the authors of these papers, including Prof. Zdorovets, performed XRD measurements personally,” and that the measurements came from a specialist at the institute whose data they had no reason to doubt. They suggested post-processing procedures such as smoothing, background correction and normalization might explain the observations. They said all the X-ray diffraction data now undergo internal verification.
The collaborator said the group felt “deliberately targeted” on PubPeer since “so-called ‘reviewers’ on PubPeer presuppose our guilt in advance.”
The research group remains open to constructive dialogue, the collaborator wrote, and maintains the observed problems are ones of method, not falsification, problems which “could and should have been resolved through correction rather than full retraction.”
While background noise duplication is the most frequent issue raised around Zdorovets’ work, seven of the retraction notices also refer to data being reused across several papers that allegedly report on different materials and experiments. One 2018 paper, published in Ceramics International, is a complete duplication of another paper published in Materials Research Express a few months earlier by a similar group of authors. The editor called the duplication a “misuse of the scientific publishing system.” A 2019 paper in Journal of Alloys and Compounds, duplicates data and tables published two months earlier in Nanomaterials. That earlier paper, now also retracted, used images published another month earlier in Vacuum.
In 2023, Zdorovets won a Scopus prize supported by Elsevier and the government of Kazakhstan to recognize leading Kazakh researchers. He was also recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan.
Retraction Watch Sleuth in Residence David Robert Grimes contributed analysis to this article.
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