Frederik Joelving

‘A new low’: Researchers at Iraqi university must cite colleagues, school journals in papers

At the University of Technology in Baghdad, students must publish papers citing the school’s own journals if they wish to graduate, as we reported earlier this month. But down the road at Mustansiriyah University, one of Iraq’s highest-ranked institutions, researchers are facing even steeper citation requirements, according to new evidence we obtained.

In a letter (in Arabic) sent to the school’s six research centers on September 18, the university council requires researchers to be first authors on at least two “of the legal minimum of three research papers” they must publish every year.

Each of these papers must cite at least three articles other faculty members at the school have published in Scopus-indexed journals, as well as one or more articles in the university’s own publications.

Exclusive: Iraqi university forcing students to cite its journals to graduate

To earn their degrees, graduate students at the University of Technology in Baghdad not only must publish research in indexed journals. They also are required to cite articles in their school’s own publications, a document obtained by Retraction Watch shows.

Experts who reviewed the document called the citation requirement “deceptive and despicable” and said it could carry a steep price for the journals involved, one of which is indexed in Scopus.

Coercive citation is widespread in academia and can help boost the rankings of publications, institutions and individual researchers. The practice is considered unethical and may trigger heavy penalties.

Iraqi dean earns another retraction for paper posted for sale on Facebook

A dean and professor at a public university in Iraq has lost another paper just weeks after we reported he was up to 16 retractions for authorship manipulation, fake peer review and other problems.

Yasser Fakri Mustafa of the University of Mosul was a coauthor of the newly retracted article, a review of how aerosol boxes affected intubation during the COVID‐19 pandemic. He denied wrongdoing.

As stated in the retraction notice, online September 23, the article’s title matched an authorship ad posted on social media on March 9, 2022, eight months before the paper appeared in Taylor & Francis’ Expert Review of Medical Devices.

Deputy minister in Iraq losing papers with signs of paper mill involvement

A high-ranking official at Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research has earned six retractions over the past two years for issues including citation stuffing and “suspicious” authorship changes after articles were accepted.

Both practices are warning signs of a paper mill at play. At least two of the official’s retracted works appeared in a special issue edited by an academic who has been accused of being part of authorship-for-sale networks.

But Hayder Abed Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, who was a corresponding author on two of the articles and a coauthor on the rest, told us the “retractions were not due to fabricated results or research misconduct on my part.” He added that “as a public figure currently involved in national projects,” he had been the target of “politically motivated campaigns aimed at damaging my reputation.”

University email addresses no longer effective bulwark against fake peer review

To guard against identity theft, academic publishers have been using institutional email addresses to verify authors and reviewers are who they say they are. Now, however, findings appearing in a preprint last month on arXiv.org suggest bad actors have found a way to breach this defense – and are routinely doing so.

From a pool of thousands of reviewer profiles set up as part of AI conferences in 2024 and 2025, staff at the nonprofit OpenReview, a platform connecting authors with reviewers, found 94 profiles involving fake identities. In all but two cases, the impostors had used “round-trip-verified” email addresses belonging to the domains of “reputed” universities, the authors write. (The remaining two used “.edu” domains of defunct institutions.)

Impersonating someone else using an institutional email address “adds another layer of challenge in the detection” of bad actors, said first author Nihar B. Shah of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who also sits on OpenReview’s board.

Exclusive: Iraqi physicist fired by ministry over massive publishing scam

A professor of physics in Iraq was permanently dismissed last week after a government investigation found he orchestrated a massive fraudulent publishing scheme involving hundreds of thousands of dollars paid into his bank account by unwitting researchers, documents obtained by Retraction Watch show.

The scam included a deal between a prominent association of Iraqi academics and a predatory publisher, as well as the creation of a fake journal website and bogus acceptance letters purporting to be from reputed journals.

According to a ministerial order dated September 9 and obtained by Retraction Watch, the physicist, Oday A. Al-Owaedi, who also goes by several other names, defrauded “researchers by collecting money from them under the pretext of publishing their papers in reputable international journals as promised, while in fact falsifying and forging publication in fake websites.”

University vice chancellor’s work crawling with ‘tortured phrases’

The chief executive of a university in Eastern India whose research is full of tortured phrases – possible signs of plagiarism – had two papers pulled in December after investigations found evidence of “compromised” peer review and other red flags in the publications.

A third article by the executive, Amiya Kumar Rath, has also come under scrutiny, a publisher told us.

Rath became vice chancellor of Biju Patnaik University of Technology in Rourkela in 2023. A computer scientist with more than 100 publications, he is listed as the second author of one of the now-withdrawn works, a 2020 review article on inspecting and grading fruits using machine learning.

‘Article broker’ in China trying to hook journal editors with fishy publishing deals

Earlier this year, China’s supreme court said companies selling fake or low-quality research papers should be punished. But shady middlemen there continue to offer questionable deals to journal editors across the globe in a bid to secure publications for their customers, emails obtained by Retraction Watch suggest.

In the emails, sent between May and August and using the same boilerplate language, the Nanjing-based agency A-Techo said it would pay an “expedited processing fee” of $500 to $1,000 US “per accepted manuscript to support the review process.”

According to its website, the company provides various types of publication support. Signatures in the correspondence we obtained listed different names of purported assistant editors, who said they were “writing on behalf of an academic institution that supports Ph.D. researchers and faculty in publishing high-quality research.”

Iraqi university dean linked to paper mills has more than a dozen retractions

A professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in Iraq has been steadily racking up retractions since 2022, with reasons ranging from authorship manipulation to irrelevant citations, peer review-by-author and not providing study data upon request.

Yasser Fakri Mustafa, who is also dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Mosul and editor-in-chief of the Iraqi Journal of Pharmacy, now has at least 16 retractions to his name, and more are likely to follow. One publisher told us it is actively investigating Mustafa’s work, and 81 of his more than 500 papers have been flagged on PubPeer.

From 2008 to 2019, Mustafa published no more than one or two articles a year, and often he had no output at all, according to the research database Dimensions. Then his output rose sharply, peaking at 120 in 2022, according to Dimensions. That same year, however, the researcher’s name appeared in a blog post by Nick Wise and Alexander Magazinov about authorship-for-sale networks. The two sleuths had found several papers by Mustafa and a slew of international coauthors that matched authorship ads on various websites, including that of a Russia-linked paper mill in Latvia, as they documented on PubPeer.

Journal let authors make undisclosed changes that masked stolen content in paper

An Elsevier journal allowed a paper containing extensive plagiarism to remain online, while letting its authors make undisclosed revisions that masked the offense, Retraction Watch has learned. But the journal’s editor-in-chief told us he has subsequently decided to retract the paper.

The article, on cognitive impairment among older adults in India, appeared online on June 15 as a pre-proof in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus. At that point, its background section included several long paragraphs that were identical, or near-identical, to text in an extended conference abstract from 2024. The study’s objectives and methods also bore strong similarity to the earlier work, which had been conducted by another group of researchers.

Poulami Barman, first author of the conference abstract and a dual-program Ph.D. student in India and Germany, became aware her work had been stolen after one of her supervisors alerted her to the new paper. It turned out she knew the article’s corresponding author well. Like Barman, Madhurima Sharma was a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai, and she had previously asked Barman to share her code. Barman had refused to do so until her work was published.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: