by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

When you discover you’re an author on a paper you’ve never seen

Learning a paper with your name on it has been published is typically something to celebrate. But for one climate scientist, a recent notification was the first he learned the manuscript even existed.

So instead of rejoicing, Jan Cermak, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, was busy writing to the journal Chemosphere about a paper he’d been credited with but never seen.

The paper, on meteorologic influences on air pollution in India, has been retracted after it became clear that a visiting fellow included Cermak as a coauthor without his permission.

Deputy department chair loses paper for image duplication, more retractions to follow

An Elsevier journal has retracted a paper coauthored by a deputy department chair at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and says it plans to retract at least two more of his articles for image-related concerns.

The 2022 paper, in Matrix Biology, describes the regulatory role of proteoglycans in remodeling of the cervix during pregnancy. According to the August 12 retraction notice, 18 of the image panels were duplicates. The paper has been cited 18 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Renato Iozzo, deputy chair of Pathology, Anatomy & Cell Biology at Jefferson, is a coauthor on the study. Neither Iozzo nor corresponding author Mala Mahendroo, a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, responded to our requests for comment.

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.

Exclusive: Cancer researcher sues MD Anderson over misconduct finding

A biochemist who worked as a postdoc at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston has sued the institution to dispute findings of research misconduct.

The researcher, Sonia Melo, now at the University of Porto in Portugal, alleges MD Anderson did not follow its own policies while conducting its investigation. Melo lost a prestigious grant in 2016 after one of her papers was retracted for containing duplicated images.

MD Anderson’s investigation concerned a paper published in Cancer Cell in 2014. On August 7 the journal marked it with a “temporary Expression of Concern” detailing duplicated and relabeled data found in the probe, which was completed in May 2024. The article has been cited 1,462 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Journal let authors make undisclosed changes that masked stolen content in paper

An Elsevier journal allowed a paper containing extensive plagiarism to remain online, while letting its authors make undisclosed revisions that masked the offense, Retraction Watch has learned. But the journal’s editor-in-chief told us he has subsequently decided to retract the paper.

The article, on cognitive impairment among older adults in India, appeared online on June 15 as a pre-proof in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus. At that point, its background section included several long paragraphs that were identical, or near-identical, to text in an extended conference abstract from 2024. The study’s objectives and methods also bore strong similarity to the earlier work, which had been conducted by another group of researchers.

Poulami Barman, first author of the conference abstract and a dual-program Ph.D. student in India and Germany, became aware her work had been stolen after one of her supervisors alerted her to the new paper. It turned out she knew the article’s corresponding author well. Like Barman, Madhurima Sharma was a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai, and she had previously asked Barman to share her code. Barman had refused to do so until her work was published.

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.

Former lab tech earns federal funding ban years after leaving science

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has barred a former lab technician at Washington State University from participating in federally funded research for three years after finding he had committed misconduct.

The case dates back more than five years. Ryan Evanoff was a scientific assistant in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology at the university’s Pullman campus. As we reported in 2020, colleagues in the department had discovered he had been fabricating gene sequence data. The falsified data led to the retraction of two papers.

A draft of the university’s investigation obtained through a public records request stated Evanoff engaged in “a repeated and measurable pattern of research material manipulation, changing of data, omission of critical research procedures and findings in lab notebooks, and making up data and results” from at least 2015 through 2019, when he left the university.

‘Biologically implausible distributions’ and self-plagiarism result in 10 retractions for ob-gyn

An obstetrician and gynecologist from an Egyptian university has garnered more than a half-dozen retractions so far this year for self plagiarism and problematic data.

Ibrahim A Abdelazim is on the faculty of Ain Shams University, Cairo, but is on “unpaid leave” and currently working at Ahmadi Hospital in Kuwait, he told us. The recent retractions bring his total to 10, along with one expression of concern. Several journals are conducting investigations into his other papers.

Published from 2012 to 2016, the retracted papers range from methods papers describing how to detect premature rupture of fetal membranes and how to sample endometrial tissue to a descriptive study of fertility after environmental crisis.

AI research journal with sham board, metrics holds researcher’s paper hostage

A journal purporting to be “cited by esteemed scholars and scientists all around the world” claims a false impact factor and attempts to charge authors a fee for withdrawing articles, Retraction Watch has learned. And the editor in chief publicly disavows any relationship with the title on his website.

The International Journal of Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation, or IJSIEC, claims to publish research on robotics, AI, “bacterial forging [sic],” bioinformatics and computing, among other topics.

A Retraction Watch reader brought the journal to our attention earlier this month. The researcher had submitted a paper to the journal but then noticed some red flags. Among them: One of the two listed editors-in-chief, Qiangfu Zhao, states on his website, “some journals are using my name to attract academic papers. I have no relation with these journals.” Zhao, a professor at the University of Aizu in Aizuwakamatsu, Japan, confirmed to us he has “no relation with this journal.”

Reviewer accused of stealing manuscript and publishing it as his own denies he refereed it

An early-career researcher who discovered a nearly identical version of her manuscript published by the researcher who reviewed — and recommended rejecting — the work for another journal is still awaiting a resolution 10 months after reporting her concerns.

Shafaq Aftab, now a lecturer at the University of Central Punjab in Pakistan, learned of the published study last fall in an alert from ResearchGate. The paper, published in Systems Research and Behavioural Science (SRBS) in September 2024, was not only similar to research she completed during her Ph.D. coursework, it was the exact work she had submitted to another journal in late 2023, Aftab told Retraction Watch.

An email exchange she had with the editor of that journal, Information Development (IDV), confirmed the author of the published study was a reviewer of Aftab’s manuscript.

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