Category: iran retractions

With retractions piling up and more than a dozen expressions of concern now added to the list of his publishing woes, a urologist in Iran claims his research is being targeted by American drugmaker Johnson & Johnson.

Mohammad Reza Safarinejad, who offered no evidence for his allegations, says he retired from academia about 10 years ago and now runs a private clinic in Tehran. He has published scores of studies on topics ranging from treatments for premature ejaculation to saffron’s effect on semen, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations. 

Starting in 2011, however, journals began pulling his papers over such issues as failure to verify data and inappropriate statistical analyses. The latest retraction, from August 2022, brings the tally up to 15, according to the Retraction Watch Database. And on January 10, The Journal of Urology issued expressions of concern for 14 of his papers, which have been cited a total of nearly 800 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal states:

The science minister of Iran has amassed four retractions recently over concerns about the authenticity of chemicals used in the studies. 

Mohammad Ali Zolfigol, who has held the post of Minister of Science, Research and Technology for more than a year, is first or second author in all four of the papers, which appeared between 2015 and 2016 in journals published by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry. 

The authors acknowledge that they had been using the wrong substance – a molecule called tricyanomethane – claiming to have purchased a fake form of the chemical. But Zolfigol and his colleagues object to the retractions, on grounds that aren’t clear. 

A lung specialist who has held positions in Iran’s Ministry of Health and National Medical Council now has two retractions and five corrections of his published papers for re-using text. 

In the case of the retractions, the re-used text was an entire paper. 

Esmaeil Idani (who also spells his last name “Eidani”), now affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, is a middle author on two papers retracted for republication, and corrections to two of his papers acknowledge duplicated text with each other and a third paper. 

According to an online CV, Idani has worked as “Deputy Secretary of the Medical Education and Training Council” for Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and from 2013-2017 was chairman of the Supreme Medical Council of Iran. He has not responded to our request for comment. 

A group of nanotechnology researchers in Iran is up to nine retractions after losing four papers in a go for problematic figures.

The work was led by Abolfazl Akbarzadeh, a medicinal chemist at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, who has spent time as a visiting professor at Boston University and UCLA. Commenters on PubPeer including Elisabeth Bik and “Hoya camphorifolia” have raised questions about the papers, with posts dating back to November 2020.

The latest retractions involve articles that appeared in Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology, a Taylor & Francis title. Evidently, the papers appear to have had…artificial data.