Frederik Joelving

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.

Was nonsense ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ phrase a Farsi typo?

~~Vegetative~~ Scanning electron microscope
*Wikimedia Commons*

A gibberish phrase that caught the attention of science sleuths after it slipped into several journals might trace its origin to a typo in Farsi rather than questionable use of AI, as we reported earlier this month.

Nearly two dozen scientific papers, including some in journals from major publishers, mysteriously refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope.” As we wrote in our previous story, sleuth Alexander Magazinov speculated on PubPeer “the phrase could have originated through faulty digital processing of a two-column article from 1959 in which the word ‘vegetative’ appeared in the left column directly opposite ‘electron microscopy’ in the right.”

Most of the articles containing the strange wording included authors from Iran. Magazinov told us perhaps an AI model had picked up the phrase from the 1959 article and spit it back into machine-generated text that was later plagiarized in other papers by the same Iranian network of fraudsters.

As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.

Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of “vegetative electron microscopy” shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.

Researcher linked to paper mill activity mysteriously reappeared on list of journal’s editorial board

An engineer accused of being involved in paper mill activities mysteriously reappeared on a list of editorial board members at Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports earlier this year, Retraction Watch has learned.

The journal had “parted ways” with the engineer, Masoud Afrand of the Islamic Azad University in Iran, in March 2022 after an internal audit found “irregularities” in how he handled papers, editor-in-chief Rafal Marszalek told us last year.

Because of “an oversight,” however, Afrand remained on the publication’s website until a story by Retraction Watch and Undark raised concerns about his work last year.

Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors. Are they being scammed?

On November 12, Richard Addante, an associate editor at the journal Frontiers in Psychology, received an alarming email from someone purporting to be a faculty member at a university in China.

“I have a lot of papers to publish, papers on computers, medicine, materials, and so on,” the email, signed by a “Wei Yang” of Zhengzhou College of Business and Industry, stated. “If you can help me publish my paper, I’ll pay you $1500 as a referral fee.”

To Addante, a psychologist at Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, the message suggested the field of scientific publishing needed a thorough clean-up.

Mega journal Cureus kicks out organizations critics called paper mills

The embattled mega journal Cureus has closed six of its so-called “academic channels,” which it bills as low-cost publication platforms that “will turn your organization into a publishing powerhouse,” Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows a joint investigation in May by Science and Retraction Watch that found several organizations critics described as dressed-up paper mills had their own channels at the medical journal.

As we reported in September, indexing for Cureus, which is published by Springer Nature, was recently put on hold by Clarivate’s Web of Science, apparently due to quality concerns.

Embattled rocket scientist loses paper following Retraction Watch report

A controversial rocket scientist in India earned his fourth retraction in October after an investigation at a physics journal found a core part of his work was “inaccurate and paradoxical.”

At issue is a highly technical concept developed by V.R. Sanal Kumar, a professor of aerospace engineering at Amity University in New Delhi. Other scientists have denounced the concept, which Kumar has dubbed “Sanal flow choking,” as “absolute nonsense,” as we reported in April.

The editors of AIP Advances appear to agree. An October 9 notice announcing the retraction of “A closed-form analytical model for predicting 3D boundary layer displacement thickness for the validation of viscous flow solvers” stated:

Highly cited engineer offers guaranteed publication, citations in return for coauthorship

Last year, a researcher at a U.S. university received an email offering what the subject line described as a “great opportunity to publish an article.”

The author of the email, Mahdi Shariati, an adjunct professor of civil engineering at Ton Duc Thang University, in Vietnam, said he had read one of the researcher’s papers and was impressed by its quality. “It would be an honor for me to collaborate with you and jointly present your remarkable work,” Shariati added.

In exchange, Shariati promised:

Young employee’s death puts workplace culture in spotlight at publisher MDPI

The sudden death of a 27-year-old woman in the Romania offices of MDPI, a major open-access publisher with a worldwide presence, has grabbed national headlines and raised questions about the conditions under which the firm’s employees work.

Local news reports said the woman had initially fainted in MDPI’s Bucharest office on Friday, October 4, but that her superiors refused to call an ambulance or let her go home after she revived. She later collapsed again and died from a heart attack after efforts to resuscitate her failed, according to the reports.

A business consultant in Romania also wrote about the case in a blog post, quoting emails from anonymous MDPI employees describing a “toxic” work environment and “constant pressures” to perform.

But in an interview with Retraction Watch, a colleague of the deceased woman, identified as Maria Alexandra Anghel, contested the media’s account of events.

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