by country – Retraction Watch

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.

Despite new retractions, suspect organ transplant papers remain in the literature

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.

Although more than 40 papers were retracted or otherwise flagged shortly after the 2019 study was published, by our count, only 44 of the 445 papers have been retracted to date. At least 17 of the articles marked with expressions of concern in 2019-2020 remain as such.

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.

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.

Sleuth loses paper for duplicate publication after flagging hundreds of untrustworthy articles

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.

Ben Mol, who leads the Evidence-based Women’s Health Care Research Group in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Monash University in Australia, has worked to raise awareness of problematic data informing medical recommendations for women’s health care, and to cleanse the literature of unreliable studies, with major media outlets covering his work.

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.

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.

Soil scientist previously named in citation scandal appointed to editor role at Elsevier journal

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 Research announced 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:

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.”

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