by country – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

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Yasser Fakri Mustafa of the University of Mosul was a coauthor of the newly retracted article, a review of how aerosol boxes affected intubation during the COVID‐19 pandemic.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

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.”

University vice chancellor’s work crawling with ‘tortured phrases’

The chief executive of a university in Eastern India whose research is full of tortured phrases – possible signs of plagiarism – had two papers pulled in December after investigations found evidence of “compromised” peer review and other red flags in the publications.

A third article by the executive, Amiya Kumar Rath, has also come under scrutiny, a publisher told us.

Rath became vice chancellor of Biju Patnaik University of Technology in Rourkela in 2023. A computer scientist with more than 100 publications, he is listed as the second author of one of the now-withdrawn works, a 2020 review article on inspecting and grading fruits using machine learning.

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.

Chemist in Japan up to 40 retractions

A chemistry journal has retracted a 2020 review article by a nanotube researcher who fabricated and falsified data in dozens of studies.

The latest retraction for Naohiro Kameta brings his total to 40, earning him a place on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

In a 2020 review article in Chemical Reviews, 24 of the 610 works Kameta and his coauthors cited had themselves been retracted following the publication of the paper, according to the retraction notice. Because these references were “important components” of the review article, “the narrative and claims presented can no longer be upheld,” the notice reads. The review has been cited 164 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Cardiology researcher in Italy up to 17 retractions, most for duplication

A heart researcher from Italy has lost three papers because the articles duplicated work he had previously published. The retractions bring his tally to 17, all but one of which were for self-plagiarism.

The latest retractions for Renato De Vecchis were from the Journal of Clinical Medicine Research (JCMR). JCMR is published by Elmer Press and is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science. De Vecchis most recently listed his affiliation as San Gennaro dei Poveri Hospital in Naples. He was previously at Elena d’Aosta, a health center in Naples. His published papers are all in cardiology research.

Richard Liu, the director and CEO of Elmer Press, told us JCMR “informed the related journals” of similarities between publications. He also said the journal never heard back from the authors but “since the contents overlapped are significant [sic],” the journal decided to retract the papers.

Dean accused of plagiarism in Bulgaria not guilty, ministry report says

A governmental ministry in Bulgaria has concluded a dean at Sofia University is not guilty of plagiarism. But it appears the inquiries might not be complete.

As we reported in December, Milen Zamfirov, dean of the faculty of educational sciences at the university, had been accused of plagiarism in a 2021 paper that “seems to have significant overlap” with two other works. In February, two researchers filed a complaint to the country’s Ministry of Education and Science, alleging Zamfirov plagiarized other works in multiple papers.

The ministry assigned three reviewers to assess the articles in question, all of whom are identified only by initials in its report, released July 9.

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