by country – Retraction Watch

One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions

The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation.

Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Astana, has written or coauthored 480 papers indexed on Scopus, and one analysis puts him as the third most cited researcher in Kazakhstan. His prolific publication record has been linked to Russian paper mills, though those claims are unverified. Zdorovets has defended his work in a series of online posts, arguing the imaging similarities come from technical issues and that his own analyses prove image manipulation did not occur. He did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

The latest retraction for Zdorovets came last month when Crystallography Reports retracted a study containing electron microscope images “highly similar” to those published a year earlier in a now-retracted paper in the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry by a similar group of authors. Both papers also included images that closely resemble ones Zdorovets and his colleagues presented at a nanomaterials conference in Ukraine in 2017. In each instance, the images were meant to be showing different materials.

Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change

The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated.

“The economic commitment of climate change,” which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, looked at how changes in temperature and precipitation could affect economic growth. Forbes, the San Diego Union-Tribune and other outlets covered the paper, which has been accessed over 300,000 times. It has been cited 168 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But after two commentaries published this August raised questions about the study’s data and methodology, the researchers revisited their findings. “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction,” the retraction notice, published today, states.

Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well.

Last month we reported on allegations that one of the delisted journals, the Medical Journal of Babylon, a publication of the University of Babylon in Hilla, was coercing authors to cite its articles. Citation manipulation is widespread in Iraq and elsewhere, but is considered a form of scientific misconduct.

“The Medical Journal of Babylon was flagged for re-evaluation at the end of September when we received concerns, and because we observed outlier publication performance,” said a spokesperson from Elsevier, which owns Scopus. The publisher marked the journal as delisted in its October update of indexed and delisted titles.

Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality

Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence.

To maintain the integrity of scientific literature, the professor of psychology at Brunel University of London and her colleagues are writing to journals that are publishing papers that rely on the so-called National IQ database, which aims to rank countries based on intelligence. It has drawn criticism for the way the data were collected. Sear’s efforts have so far led to two retractions.

“There is absolutely no scientific merit whatsoever in the National IQ database,” Sear told Retraction Watch. “That means that any conclusions drawn from the database will be faulty and worthless.”

Exclusive: ‘Highly problematic’ policy has Saudi university pressuring faculty to cite its research

At Prince Sultan University in Saudi Arabia, faculty members must help raise their school’s academic standing not by doing impactful work, but by citing the institution’s research in their papers, according to a document Retraction Watch has obtained.

In an interoffice memo from 2022, Ahmed Yamani, president of the Riyadh-based institution, referred to “the rule of the requirement of citing 3-4 relevant publications in each paper” whose aim was “increasing the exposure of PSU research work and increasing the total number of PSU citations.”

Coordinated citation efforts can boost the rankings of institutions and individual researchers. The Committee on Publication Ethics considers citation manipulation unethical.

Author changes name, publishes 10 papers in journals that banned him

How to render a publishing ban moot? Change your surname and just keep submitting.

That’s what happened in the case of Hashem Babaei, aka Hashem Gharababaei. In 2010, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), a professional society based in the U.K., banned the mechanical engineering researcher from the University of Guilan from submitting his work to its journals.

But over the next 10 years, (Ghara)Babaei managed to publish at least 10 articles in the society’s journals, simply using the abbreviated version of his name while continuing to use the same email address from his institution in Rasht, Iran.

Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff

In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting. Kim hadn’t been told about the paper, nor had anyone asked his permission to use the data. The findings were central to Kim’s Ph.D. thesis and publishing them would mean the data were no longer original.

“I was shaking in the lab,” he recalled recently. “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He wanted to be credited as a coauthor on any papers using his results. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper.

Former Australian science agency ecology researcher loses two papers

One of the retracted papers proposed an epigenetic clock to estimate the age of sea turtles.
*Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0*)

A molecular ecology researcher has lost two papers and received an expression of concern for a third after coauthors flagged data issues with the papers.

All three papers appeared in Molecular Ecology Resources and describe the use of DNA methylation as an epigenetic clock to predict the age of different animals. The journal retracted two of the studies in July. The first, published in June 2021, estimated ages for three threatened fish species. The second appeared in April 2022 and proposes a clock for predicting the age of sea turtles. The articles have been cited 41 and 32 times, respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The lead author on those two studies was Benjamin Mayne, formerly a researcher at Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), based in Canberra.

Exclusive: Web of Science company involved in dubious awards in Iraq

Hayder A. Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, speaks at an awards ceremony at the country’s Science Day celebration.
*Source: Instagram*

In the string of prestigious awards Qusay Hassan, a mechanical engineer at the University of Diyala in Iraq, had received from the hands of his country’s minister for higher education and scientific research, the last two stood out: Each trophy carried the name and logo of the global analytics company Clarivate, a name seen widely as a key scholarly imprimatur.

The British-American firm runs the influential Web of Science Master Journal List, which it curates based on several quality criteria, and also calculates journal impact factors. The company says it takes retractions into account when calculating its highly coveted researcher designations.

But Hassan, who has had 21 papers retracted, was one of several Iraqi scientists and institutions winning accolades at the ministry’s high-profile Iraq Education Conference 2025 in Baghdad earlier this month. At the award ceremony on October 11, a deputy minister said a Clarivate team helped develop the selection criteria for the awards, which were based on Web of Science data. Like the other winners, Hassan received his two trophies from the minister, Naeem Abd Yaser Al-Aboudi, after a Clarivate representative announced his name from the stage.

‘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.

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