Following criticism from scientists around the world, a virology journal has retracted a paper describing the first test in humans of an Iran-made vaccine against COVID-19.
Iran licensed the home-grown Noora vaccine for emergency use in 2022 and has reportedly administered millions of doses to its citizens. The country’s health authorities say the shot is 94% effective.
The now-retracted paper, published in 2022 in the Journal of Medical Virology, was the only report on the clinical development of the vaccine to have appeared in an international journal. The article has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
A recent review article whose authors included two assistant professors at universities in the United States was written by a physician in India who is running a paper mill, Retraction Watch has learned.
The two assistant professors – Yuguang Liu of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Ajeet Kaushik of Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland – have not previously been tied to paper-mill publications and denied any knowledge of the ad.
A paper on green innovation that drew sharp rebuke for using questionable and undisclosed methods to replace missing data will be retracted, its publisher told Retraction Watch.
Previous work by one of the authors, a professor of economics in Sweden, is also facing scrutiny, according to another publisher.
As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.”
Heshmati and his coauthor, Mike Tsionas, a professor of economics at Lancaster University in the UK who died recently, made no mention of missing data or how they dealt with them in their 2023 article, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” Instead, the paper gave the impression of a complete dataset. One economist argued in a guest post on our site that there was “no justification” for such lack of disclosure.
An Indian paper mill featuring prominently in our recent investigation in Science and a companion piece on our website shut down its WhatsApp community six days after the stories ran, Retraction Watch has learned.
The company, called iTrilon, used the messaging platform to hawk authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” It claimed to have connections at journals that allowed the mill to guarantee acceptance of most of its papers.
But on January 24, Sarath Ranganathan, iTrilon’s scientific director, deactivated the WhatsApp community he had been curating.
Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.
The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.
“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career. (His identity is known to Retraction Watch.)
A journal quietly retracted two papers after a six-month Retraction Watch investigation linked them, and two of the journal’s editors, to the Indian paper mill iTrilon.
Based in Chennai, iTrilon hawks authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” The company, whose website disappeared following our exposé in Science, claims to have connections at journals that allow it to guarantee acceptance of many of its papers.
We published the matchingads last week in a companion piece to the Science article that linked a professor and dean at a university in Spain to several iTrilon papers. The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, acknowledged paying the paper mill, but said he thought the money was meant to cover article-processing charges. He has since taken down his LinkedIn profile.
Two assistant professors at universities in the United States are coauthors of a review that appears to have been advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon, a Retraction Watch investigation has found.
One of the professors, Yuguang Liu of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is also guest editor of the MDPI special issue in the journal Biosensors in which the review was published last year. The other professor, Ajeet Kaushik of Florida Polytechnic University, in Lakeland, sits on the editorial boards of Biosensors and several other titles from MDPI, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature and other publishers.
An MDPI representative said Liu, who declined an interview request, had not been involved in editorial decisions regarding the paper. Meanwhile, Kaushik acknowledged his work on the article had sprung from a LinkedIn message from a researcher in India who, as we reported last week, has been offering co-authorship in return for help getting his articles published.
“This is sad,” Kaushik told us by email, adding that he had not seen “any red flags” when he agreed to collaborate on the review.
Zulfiqar Habib, dean of computer science at COMSATS University Islamabad, in Pakistan, was appalled when he discovered part of a former PhD student’s dissertation had been published in a scientific journal.
After all, the former student, Kurshid Asghar, had been dead for more than a year by the time the manuscript was submitted to Security and Communication Networks, a Hindawi title. And Habib knew none of Asghar’s coauthors had contributed to the research, which Habib had supervised.
“It was both shocking and unbelievable,” he told Retraction Watch.
Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.
How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.
At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way.
New editorial policies at an MDPI title accused of publishing “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary” animal studies are missing the mark, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a U.S-based advocacy group.
A former reviewer for the journal, and one of the more than 1,100 signatories of a recent PCRM boycott letter, said she resigned from the post after realizing Nutrients published research that was “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary,” according to a press release from November.
Email correspondence made public here for the first time shows Nutrients continues to reject the group’s concerns. In one message from 2022, it told PCRM that 21 papers flagged as problematic “contained ethics statements that are in accordance with the journal policies.”
