Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on our leaderboard.
The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses.
Louis – who also goes by Louis Hitler Muzong – did not respond to Retraction Watch’s requests for comment. Until recently, his LinkedIn page named him as a Ph.D. student in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, with an expected completion date of October 2027. But retraction notices for two papers say Louis requested his Leeds affiliation be removed. One states “the research described in the article is not associated with that institution,” and the other that the affiliation “was given incorrectly.” The University of Leeds did not respond to a request to verify whether he was a student there.
Since we sent him questions, Louis’ LinkedIn profile appears to have been scrubbed. It no longer includes mention of Leeds, nor does it include previously listed affiliations to the University of Calabar in Nigeria or the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Now, the page identifies him only as working in chemistry in Nigeria. According to his profiles on Google Scholar and ResearchGate, however, Louis is a researcher in the Computational Chemistry and BioSimulation Research Group at the University of Calabar.
The most frequently named issue in the 35 retraction notices is that the authors use the same plots to represent different chemical systems, with duplications occurring in a single paper or across papers.
Innocent Benjamin, who appears as a coauthor with Louis on 19 of the retracted papers, graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a master’s in biology and biotechnology in 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile. Benjamin told us editorial concerns about image duplication “were largely centred on figure presentation and interpretation, not on fabrication of computational data.”
“There was no intent to misrepresent results,” he wrote. “The issue concerned visual presentation and interpretability rather than generation of artificial data.”
In at least eight of the retractions, named problems include citation manipulation. By the time one paper went from submission to publication in Heliyon, the authors had added 28 citations that were “not relevant to the topic of the paper and benefit authors,” including Louis, according to the retraction notice. In another Heliyon paper, between submission and publication, self-citations for Louis increased from seven to 38 and from two to nine for Benjamin. And in a third Heliyon paper, self-citations jumped from one to 14 for Louis and from two to 11 for Benjamin.
The notices state the authors were asked to explain why these references were added but were unable to give satisfactory answers. Benjamin told us that the references were included to provide context within their stream of research.
Two of the retraction notices also point to compromised peer review. These include one in Heliyon in which reviewers had asked for redundant references to their own papers, and another in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry, where editors expressed “significant doubts about the objectivity and thoroughness of the reviews conducted.”
A spokesperson for Elsevier, the publisher of these journals, said the reviewers had provided “biased and inaccurate reviews,” resulting in “flawed” articles. “It was subsequently determined that the issues identified warranted retraction rather than a corrigendum,” the spokesperson said. Twenty of Louis’ 35 retractions come from Elsevier journals. The spokesperson said they found out about the issues from a whistleblower and that investigation is still ongoing.
One Heliyon retraction notice identified “substantial” changes in authorship during the editorial process. Between submission and publication, five authors were added and one removed without adequate explanation or proof those added were qualified for authorship.
Several more of the retraction notices identify problems with the science. One paper retracted from Chemical Physics Impact included incorrect chemistry, and the authors claimed in the abstract to have analyzed UV spectroscopy data — an analysis which wasn’t included in the paper or the supplementary information. Another retracted paper from Scientific Reports had basic errors related to the conversion of units and incorrect calculations.
Retractions that include Benjamin, Louis’ frequent coauthor, date to August 2024, when Benjamin was a student at the University of Portsmouth. A spokesperson for that institution told us, “The retractions you reference relate to publications outside the scope of [Benjamin’s] degree studies,” adding the university only investigates conduct related to work for a specific degree.
Benjamin said he is “cooperating fully” with ongoing investigations.
“While retractions are serious matters, they are part of the self-correcting structure of science,” he said. “As a relatively young researcher, I remain committed to research integrity and to maintaining rigorous methodological standards in all ongoing and future research.”
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].