A journal has retracted three papers after an investigation revealed one of the authors falsely claimed he was affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture.
All three retraction notices, issued February 13 by the Journal of Environmental Management, state study coauthor Tariq Shah claimed affiliation with the USDA Plant Science Research Unit. “When asked about these issues during an editorial investigation, Shah’s responses caused the editor to further lose confidence in the validity/integrity of the article,” the notices say.
A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us in an email “Shah provided a document claiming to show his official affiliation with USDA that we later learned through our investigation was forged.” Neither Shah nor Elsevier clarified what the document was.
A USDA spokesperson confirmed in an email to Retraction Watch “there are no identified records that Tariq Shah was ever employed by the USDA or the Agricultural Research Service,” noting the papers were “falsely attributed” to the USDA.
One paper, published in October 2023, has been cited eight times; a December 2023 paper has been cited 12 times; and one from March 2024 has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Shah, whose Scopus profile lists him as a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, told us his listed affiliation with the USDA was an “unintentional mistake.” Shah was a visiting scholar for six months in 2022 at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in the lab of Manuel Kleiner, as confirmed in a newsletter sent out by the university and Kleiner’s curriculum vitae. The lab is funded by the USDA, according to their website. Whether Shah was performing research included in the papers while he was at NCSU is unclear.
“My mistake was that many people there used the USDA affiliation and I also did the same,” Shah told us in an email. He also said he provided “each and every document” requested by the editors and called the decision to retract “biased.”
Muhammad Faraz Bhatti, a coauthor on the March 2024 paper, told us by email none of the coauthors was aware Shah was not affiliated with the USDA. “Shah informed us that he has a PhD in Plant Sciences from France and has recently secured a position in the USDA,” wrote Bhatti, a professor at National University of Sciences and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Bhatti told us Shah became involved with the research group after befriending Zeeshan Khan, a Ph.D. student at the same university in Pakistan and an author on all three of the papers.
Bhatti sent us a copy of the Research Collaboration Agreement form, on which the “Collaborating Institute/University” is listed as the USDA and Shah is named as the collaborator.
In the same email to Retraction Watch, Bhatti expressed frustration over the journal’s decision to retract the article rather than removing Shah as coauthor:
making retractions based on wrong information from a co-author is equal to destroying the dignity of the corresponding author (PhD supervisor), the PhD student who worked for 2.5 years on a project, and respected members of the PhD guidance committee (Supervisory committee) who are also co-authors in the paper.
Bhatti said the journal’s editors emailed him before retracting, but due to his “tight teaching and research schedule” and the “generic title of the email,” he overlooked the message. “Keeping in view the severity of the matter, in my view the Editor needed to send a reminder of the email, and we would definitely respond our stance [sic],” he said. The authors have appealed the decision to retract and are waiting for a response from the journal’s ethics committee.
The retraction notices on the other two papers note Parvaiz Ahmad, co-corresponding author along with Shah, “cooperated with the investigation in full.” Ahmad, who has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer, did not respond to our request for comment.
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