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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Six years after researchers called for the retraction of more than 400 papers about organ transplantation amid suspicion the organs used in the studies came from executed Chinese prisoners, journals are still working to clear the record.
The analysis, published in BMJ Open, found more than 400 studies of organ transplants in China that didn’t report whether the sources gave their consent for donation, nor assurances the organs involved did not come from executed prisoners. As reported by The Guardian in 2019, the study exposed “a mass failure of English language medical journals to comply with international ethical standards in place to ensure organ donors provide consent for transplantation.” Thirteen retractions this year directly cite the Rogers paper.
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.
A sleuth who has identified several hundred articles describing clinical women’s health research with untrustworthy data, leading to nearly 300 retractions, has now lost one of his own papers for duplicate publication.
Mol told Retraction Watch about 50 of his papers have been investigated since 2020, usually after anonymous complaints. “It is clear that somebody had been screening my papers … in a systematic way to find any wrongdoing,” he said. His only other retraction came after he and colleagues found an error in their own work and requested the action.
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.
A soil scientist who resigned from several journals in 2017 after being linked to manipulated citations has been appointed to the editorial board of a journal copublished by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media.
International Soil and Water Conservation Researchannounced in April that Artemi Cerdà would serve as an editorial board member, describing him as a “renowned researcher” in the field of soil erosion and land management. The appointment comes eight years after Cerdà, of the University of Valencia, in Spain, was found to have manipulated citations in favor of his own work and journals with which he was associated.
While Cerdà has not responded to our questions about his appointment, a spokesperson for Elsevier acknowledged Cerdà’s history but defended the decision, writing that researchers “grow into their roles through participation and learning.” The spokesperson continued:
