Iraq – Retraction Watch

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.

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Yasser Fakri Mustafa of the University of Mosul was a coauthor of the newly retracted article, a review of how aerosol boxes affected intubation during the COVID‐19 pandemic.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.

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.”

Exclusive: Iraqi physicist fired by ministry over massive publishing scam

A professor of physics in Iraq was permanently dismissed last week after a government investigation found he orchestrated a massive fraudulent publishing scheme involving hundreds of thousands of dollars paid into his bank account by unwitting researchers, documents obtained by Retraction Watch show.

The scam included a deal between a prominent association of Iraqi academics and a predatory publisher, as well as the creation of a fake journal website and bogus acceptance letters purporting to be from reputed journals.

According to a ministerial order dated September 9 and obtained by Retraction Watch, the physicist, Oday A. Al-Owaedi, who also goes by several other names, defrauded “researchers by collecting money from them under the pretext of publishing their papers in reputable international journals as promised, while in fact falsifying and forging publication in fake websites.”

Iraqi university dean linked to paper mills has more than a dozen retractions

A professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in Iraq has been steadily racking up retractions since 2022, with reasons ranging from authorship manipulation to irrelevant citations, peer review-by-author and not providing study data upon request.

Yasser Fakri Mustafa, who is also dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Mosul and editor-in-chief of the Iraqi Journal of Pharmacy, now has at least 16 retractions to his name, and more are likely to follow. One publisher told us it is actively investigating Mustafa’s work, and 81 of his more than 500 papers have been flagged on PubPeer.

From 2008 to 2019, Mustafa published no more than one or two articles a year, and often he had no output at all, according to the research database Dimensions. Then his output rose sharply, peaking at 120 in 2022, according to Dimensions. That same year, however, the researcher’s name appeared in a blog post by Nick Wise and Alexander Magazinov about authorship-for-sale networks. The two sleuths had found several papers by Mustafa and a slew of international coauthors that matched authorship ads on various websites, including that of a Russia-linked paper mill in Latvia, as they documented on PubPeer.

Two journals, same name: Did one editor retract the other’s paper?

Two journals sharing the same title — allegedly due to an “academic divorce” between the founders — are giving two different accounts to why a paper may (or may not) have been retracted.

Confused yet? We are.

Here’s what we can piece together. The journal Amphibian and Reptile Conservation once had two editors, Craig Hassapakis and Robert Browne; both names appear on the same cover of a 2011-2012 issue of the journal, as librarian Jeffrey Beall noted in a blog post published last year. But since then, there seems to have been an “academic split” between the two (as defined by Beall), and each now publishes a different version of the publication named Amphibian and Reptile Conservation.

Recently, we came across a 2013 paper co-authored by Browne marked “Retracted” on the version of the site founded by Craig Hassapakis. Browne’s version of the journal can be found here.

Meanwhile, the study’s first author, Omar Fadhil Al-Sheikhly from the University of Baghdad in Iraq, claims the paper was never retracted in the first place: Continue reading Two journals, same name: Did one editor retract the other’s paper?

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