by reason for retraction – 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.

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Yasser Fakri Mustafa of the University of Mosul was a coauthor of the newly retracted article, a review of how aerosol boxes affected intubation during the COVID‐19 pandemic.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

‘Cosmic magnet’ study retracted after cleaning agent wipes away results

Electron diffraction patterns of an alloy before (left) and after (right) cleaning revealed the cleaning agent was was responsible for reflections (circle, right) reported in the original study. *O.S. Houghton et al/Adv. Sci. 2024*

When measuring the properties of a particular material, you want to make sure your sample is as clean as possible. But sometimes a well-intentioned effort to purify can make things worse.

Just ask Lindsay Greer, a professor of materials science at the University of Cambridge. He and his colleagues discovered measurements they reported in 2022 were actually an artifact of a cleaning agent used to prepare their sample.

Greer became aware of the issue during unsuccessful attempts to replicate his lab’s discovery of magnetic properties in an alloy their collaborators had made. Instead, they found oxidation from a cleaning product had contaminated their original results. The error led to a retraction, a declined grant, a commentary describing their troubleshooting — and a story about science working as it should.

Wiley retracts study stolen by reviewer, following Retraction Watch coverage

A Wiley journal has retracted a paper more than a year after a researcher reported the work was hers and had been stolen by a reviewer for another journal.

As we reported in July, Shafaq Aftab, now a lecturer at the University of Central Punjab in Pakistan, contacted Wiley in September 2024 after discovering a paper published in one of its journals, Systems Research and Behavioral Science (SRBS), was the exact work she submitted to a different journal a year earlier.

The retraction notice, issued October 1, states an investigation found “significant unattributed overlap with an unpublished manuscript” and data the authors provided to the journal were “insufficient to resolve the concerns.” Subsequently, “additional scientific errors were identified in the manuscript,” according to the notice.

Journal issues speedy retraction in less than a day for ‘inadvertent mistake’

We don’t know if it’s the fastest retraction ever, but the speed is nonetheless notable: A journal retracted a paper 22 hours after a sleuth raised concerns about the article.

On August 9 just before noon, John Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and journal editor in Australia, reached out to two journals to notify them of image similarities he had flagged on PubPeer.

Loadsman asked the authors to clarify the “apparent identity” of a figure in a 2023 paper in Experimental Biomedical Research. The figure resembled one in a different paper by the same authors “representing different experimental conditions,” he wrote in his PubPeer comment. The second paper appeared in Wiley’s International Journal of Endocrinology in 2019.

Former student who ran paper mill up to 11 retractions

A former bioinformatics student who operated a paper mill while at the University of Manchester has lost another paper, bringing his total to 11 retractions.

Sameer Quazi had been enrolled in the school’s “PGCert” program in clinical bioinformatics, as Retraction Watch reported in January when the university released a statement saying an investigation found he “was running a paper mill.” The investigation panel had requested the retraction of 10 papers, but didn’t say which ones.

Quazi’s most recent retraction, a 2023 paper on antimicrobial agents, appeared in the MDPI journal Antibiotics. According to the September 12 notice, the journal was “unable to verify the identity, contribution, or affiliations of a number of the authors listed on this manuscript, nor could the origins of the study be confirmed.” The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Taylor & Francis threatens legal action against anonymous group’s ‘highly defamatory’ claims

Taylor & Francis has threatened legal action against an online group that has made allegations, based largely on vague insinuations rather than evidence, about the publisher and a member of its research integrity team.

The group, ScienceGuardians, is an anonymous organization whose website serves as what they call an online “journal club.” On X, it has been posting so-called “investigations” of several sleuths, publishers and organizations, what it calls “perpetrators of the PubPeer Network Mob.” Its targets have included sleuths Kevin Patrick and Reese Richardson, and others such as Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp, and its posts are often amplified by those whose work has been questioned on PubPeer or retracted.

On September 7, the group published a string of claims on X about Nick Wise, a sleuth who joined Taylor & Francis in January as a research integrity manager. The ScienceGuardians post characterized the move as Wise “infiltrated” the publisher’s research integrity office. The post states he is responsible for 1,300 posts on PubPeer (which we have noted he does under his real name), and, ScienceGuardians claims, more than 100 others under the name “Simnia avena.”

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