A chemist in Austria who earned a retraction earlier this year is under investigation by his former university, a national research integrity agency and the publisher Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned, while scrutiny of his publication record has broadened to include more papers flagged on PubPeer.
Maximilian Lackner, a technical chemist and process engineer at FH Technikum Wien in Austria until October last year, according to his ORCID profile, was the senior and corresponding author on a paper in npj Science of Food retracted in January after publishers discovered the five of the cited references weren’t relevant to the claims they were meant to be supporting. The 2024 article has been cited 90 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Editors also pointed out the information in a flow diagram for selecting studies didn’t appear anywhere else in the article. One of the authors, Fatemeh Ahmadi of the University of Western Australia, told the journal she and Lackner disagreed with the retraction. When we asked why, Ahmadi said the authors were “not interested” in our request for further information.
Citation mismatches are also a feature of several more of Lackner’s papers flagged on PubPeer, as well as images that seem to have been pulled from websites instead of original experiments. FH Technikum Wien, Lackner’s former university, is investigating Lackner in collaboration with the ÖAWI, Austria’s national research integrity agency, according to Florian Eckkrammer, FH Technikum Wien’s CEO. He said such investigations typically last six months. ÖAWI declined to confirm whether an investigation was under way, citing European confidentiality protections.
Lackner had been listed as a keynote speaker at the Global Conference on Agriculture and Horticulture this September, but is no longer listed on their site. The organizers have not responded to a request for comment, nor has Lackner.
Among Lackner’s articles flagged on PubPeer is one 2025 paper in Scientific Reports that cites X-ray diffraction measurements on Mars as a reference for information about herbal medicines in underdeveloped communities. It also cites a study on a plant fiber used in acetaminophen tablets as a reference for information about the location of a hill in North Punjab in India. Lackner wrote, reviewed and edited the article, according to the contribution statement. Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity at Springer Nature, said the publisher is looking into the paper after we asked about these issues.
Another article flagged on PubPeer received a lengthy correction after a commenter pointed out that some of the data in the graphs did not match the text in the paper. When asked about the correction, first author Rasiravathanahalli Kaveriyappan Govindarajan said that they had taken the concerns “very seriously,” and that the journal had confirmed the corrections were adequate — despite additional issues raised on PubPeer. “As this matter may involve ongoing external considerations, I prefer not to comment further at this stage to ensure accuracy and transparency,” Govindarajan said.
Another, published in Elsevier’s Industrial Crops and Products, appears to have reused images from a previously published paper. The paper also contains unexplained black boxes obscuring information on the graphs. First author Ghulam Murtaza, who is a coauthor with Lackner on several other papers flagged on PubPeer, has separately earned a retraction for “evidence of peer review and citation manipulation” and another for concerns about methodology and reference accuracy. Murtaza did not respond to requests for comment.
Elsevier, which published seven of Lackner’s flagged papers on PubPeer, said in a statement that the case is currently under investigation and that it could not disclose further details until complete.
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].
Not sure anyone loses regarding that conference. It’s from Magnus Group, well known to be a Predatory Conference organizer.