india retractions – Retraction Watch

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:

Controversial rocket scientist in India threatens legal action after journals pull papers

A professor of aerospace engineering in India who developed a scientific theory critics call “absolute nonsense” said he is suing journal editors and publishers for pulling three papers he claims could help protect “millions of lives.”

The articles, one in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports and two in Wiley’s Global Challenges, described a highly technical concept eponymously dubbed “Sanal flow choking.” The first was retracted last summer, the other two in March.

“The retractions of our papers are unjustified,” V. R. Sanal Kumar of Amity University in New Delhi told Retraction Watch. “Our legal representatives are actively pursuing a defamation lawsuit against these editors and their illicit agents who were responsible for retracting articles crucial for safeguarding countless lives.”

Indian paper mill disbands WhatsApp community following investigation

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.

Chemist in India loses seven papers, blames outsourcing of images

A chemistry researcher in India has had seven of his papers retracted after the publisher concluded that some images in the papers showed “unexpected similarities” or had been duplicated.

The retraction notices, issued in late March by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the U.K., all state that:

The authors informed the Editor that the characterization of the original samples was outsourced, and they do not have the original raw data for the published results.

Given the significance of the concerns about the validity of the data, and the lack of raw data, the findings presented in this paper are not reliable.

The corresponding author, Dhanaraj Gopi of Periyar University in Tamil Nadu, had several papers flagged on PubPeer starting in 2019, including some that have not been retracted.

Frontiers retracts a dozen papers, many more expected

The publisher Frontiers has retracted at least a dozen papers in the last month, after announcing an “extensive internal investigation” into “potentially falsified research.”

Here’s an example of a notice, this one from Frontiers in Endocrinology for “Overexpression of microRNA-216a-3p Accelerates the Inflammatory Response in Cardiomyocytes in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Targeting IFN-α2,” which was originally published in November 2020:

Engineering professor up to nine retractions for image problems

An engineering researcher is up to nine retractions for image issues, having lost eight papers in the last month.

Yashvir Singh, of India’s Graphic Era University — ironically enough, given the reasons for the retractions — is the first author on seven of the papers, and second author on the eighth, which appeared between 2016 and 2019. All eight articles were published in journals owned by Taylor & Francis, and have been cited more than 80 times in total, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Issues with the 2017 paper “Effect of load on friction and wear characteristics of Jatropha oil bio-lubricants,” in Biofuels were flagged in a post on PubPeer last July.

Biofuels issued this notice on January 18:

‘A satisfactory explanation was not provided’: Physicists in India lose third paper

A team of physicists in India has notched their third retraction for problematic images and other issues that also have prompted at least four corrections of their work.

The authors, Sk. Shahenoor Basha, of the Solid State Ionics Laboratory at KL University in Guntur, and M.C. Rao, of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada, have lost a 2018 article in the International Journal of Polymer Science titled ““Spectroscopic and electrochemical properties of [PVA/PVP]:[MgCl2{6H2O}] blend polymer electrolyte films.”

According to the retraction notice:

Award-winning researcher in India retracts two papers, corrects three

Kithiganahalli Narayanaswamy Balaji, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has retracted two papers and corrected three for duplication of images.

Balaji, who won the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize from India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) “for outstanding contributions to science and technology,” is last author of the five papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) from 2008 to 2015.

The authors take responsibility for what they call “inadvertent mistakes.” The retraction notice for “Pathogen-specific TLR2 protein activation programs macrophages to induce Wnt-β-catenin signaling,” for example, concludes as follows:

Cancer researcher up to five retractions

A researcher in India is up to five retractions, by our count, for problematic data and image issues.

The latest retractions involve articles published in 2008 and 2013 in the journal Life Sciences. The last author on the papers is Yogeshwer Shukla, of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, about whom we have previously written.

The first paper, “Resveratrol induces apoptosis involving mitochondrial pathways in mouse skin tumorigenesis,” is rife with image problems:

Pair of nanotech researchers up to at least two dozen retractions

A pair of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) has had a total of nine more papers retracted, pushing their totals to 24 and 26, respectively.

The totals put the two researchers — Rashmi Madhuri, with 24 retractions, and Prashant Sharma, with 26 — on our leaderboard of the 30 authors with the most retractions in the world.

Three of the retractions appeared in RSC Advances, two appeared in Journal of Materials Chemistry B, and one each appeared in Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Biomaterials Science, and CrystEngComm.

For example, here is the retraction notice from Journal of Materials Chemistry C: Continue reading Pair of nanotech researchers up to at least two dozen retractions

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