Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name

Researchers change the name they publish under for many reasons, most of which aren’t fodder for a Retraction Watch story. Trying to skirt a publishing ban is one that is. And another case that recently caught our attention may be in a similar category.  

Researcher Abduladheem Turki Jalil is currently affiliated with the University of Thi-Qar in Nasiriyah, Iraq. His first published paper appears to be a survey on breast cancer from 2019. Jalil’s publications then took off, rising exponentially to more than 100 in 2022. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database, Jalil has an h-index of 44, and on his Instagram profile, he claims to be among the world’s top 2% scientists (he no longer is).

Jalil’s massive output has not failed to attract attention. In 2022, then-sleuth Nick Wise began flagging the researcher’s papers on PubPeer, providing screenshots of Facebook ads selling authorship of articles that matched several of Jalil’s publications. Wise also wrote a blog post about authorship-for-sale networks that mentioned Jalil and his extraordinary productivity. 

Jalil has 18 retractions in our database, and more than 90 of his articles, or about a third of all his publications, have been flagged on PubPeer.

Last year, Jalil began calling himself Abduladheem Al-Attabi on his papers. The website of the foundation he founded, Nabea Al-Ajyal, which publishes several journals, hosts conferences and offers editorial services to researchers, also referred to him as Al-Attabi until recently. But after we contacted him, the name of the foundation’s CEO and owner changed to “Mustafa Tareq Shanshool” on the website.

On Facebook, however, he is still Abduladheem Turki Jalil.

A post on X by the anonymous watchdog account @Spottingthespot suggested the name change is an attempt to bury the long list of retractions.

Jalil did not respond to our request for comment. But following our stories on research fraud in Iraq this fall and subsequent national media attention to such issues, his Google Scholar profile was removed and his name on ORCID hidden.

Some of Jalil’s collaborators may be familiar to our readers. His most frequent coauthor, Yasser Fakri Mustafa, a dean at the University of Mosul, has had more than a dozen articles pulled after being linked to paper mills, as we reported in September. Then there is Lakshmi Thangavelu, dean of international affairs at Saveetha University, or SIMATS, in Chennai, India. As we reported in 2023, Thangavelu, who also has several retractions for paper mill-related issues, offered money to international researchers for adding her institution as an affiliation on their papers, thus boosting Saveetha’s publication metrics.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Jalil’s output dropped rapidly after 2022. He has published only seven articles since he began using his new name last year and just a single new paper in 2025.

The journals he publishes at Nabea Al-Ajyal Foundation Press also appear to have taken some headwinds. Three of the titles – Trends in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, the Journal of Biomedicine and Biochemistry and Future Dental Research – were delisted in March from the Directory of Open Access Journals after failing to meet best practices. Jalil was editor-in-chief of two of these publications – the Journal of Biomedicine and Biochemistry and Trends in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology – but has since stepped down.

Not everyone seems to be worried about Jalil’s tarnished publication record. In August, the editor-in-chief of Begell House’s Critical Reviews in Oncogenesis, Benjamin Bonavida, invited Jalil to edit a special issue on exosomes in cancer, according to a letter shared on X in October. Dozens of papers by Bonavida have been flagged on PubPeer and we have written about him twice.

“As a leader in the field, I am taking this opportunity to extend you a personal and exclusive invitation to be the Editor (or Co-Editor with a colleague) for one issue beginning 2026,” Bonavida wrote to Jalil.

Bonavida did not respond to a request for comment.

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].