by reason for retraction – Page 2

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The retraction notice, issued October 1, states an investigation found “significant unattributed overlap with an unpublished manuscript” and data the authors provided to the journal were “insufficient to resolve the concerns.”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

Second study using ‘Tin Man Syndrome’ X-ray under scrutiny following Retraction Watch inquiry

An altered image posted as an April Fool’s joke (left) was used as a figure (right) in a 2021 paper in *Scientific Programming*.

Just as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first of 14 books in a series, our recent coverage of a paper on “Tin Man syndrome” seems to have sequels. After we wrote about a case study describing a man with his heart in his abdomen retracted for plagiarizing images from an April Fools’ joke, a reader flagged yet another paper using the same image.

As we previously reported, the authors of a “rare case report” appearing in Medicine claimed they had encountered a case of a man with asymptomatic “ectopia cordis interna,” in which his heart was in his abdomen. After the article was retracted, the corresponding author admitted the photos had been taken from a 2015 April Fools’ paper in Radiopaedia describing the same (fictitious) condition.

Following that coverage, a reader did a reverse image search of the X-ray in both papers and found a 2021 article from Scientific Programming, published by Wiley. The study recommends a non-conventional ventilation option for treating neonatal respiratory distress syndrome. The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

University email addresses no longer effective bulwark against fake peer review

To guard against identity theft, academic publishers have been using institutional email addresses to verify authors and reviewers are who they say they are. Now, however, findings appearing in a preprint last month on arXiv.org suggest bad actors have found a way to breach this defense – and are routinely doing so.

From a pool of thousands of reviewer profiles set up as part of AI conferences in 2024 and 2025, staff at the nonprofit OpenReview, a platform connecting authors with reviewers, found 94 profiles involving fake identities. In all but two cases, the impostors had used “round-trip-verified” email addresses belonging to the domains of “reputed” universities, the authors write. (The remaining two used “.edu” domains of defunct institutions.)

Impersonating someone else using an institutional email address “adds another layer of challenge in the detection” of bad actors, said first author Nihar B. Shah of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who also sits on OpenReview’s board.

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.

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