Exclusive: Embattled dean accused of plagiarism in NSF report

Erick Jones, the dean of engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno, appears to have engaged in extensive plagiarism in the final report he submitted to the National Science Foundation for a grant, Retraction Watch has learned.

The $28,238 grant partially supported a three-day workshop that Jones and his wife, Felicia Jefferson, held for 21 students in Washington, DC, in April 2022 titled “Broadening Participation in Engineering through Improved Financial Literacy.” Jefferson received a separate award for $21,757.

Jones submitted his final report to the agency in May 2023. Retraction Watch obtained a copy of that report through a public records request to Jones’s previous employer, the University of Texas at Arlington, and identified three published sources of extended passages he used without citation or quotation marks.

Jones, who has been criticized for publishing “bizarre” and “incoherent” articles in the journal he founded, the International Supply Chain Technology Journal, did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, a student at his university launched a petition to demand his resignation which has now garnered more than 200 signatures.

Saudi university dean has 20 retractions in two years

A prolific Saudi pharmacy professor published over 200 papers in the last four years, but in recent months the quality of these papers has come into question.

Nabil Alhakamy, a dean of research and higher education at King AbdulAziz University’s Faculty of Pharmacy, has had more than 20 articles retracted — the most recent of which came on January 30 in AAPS PharmSciTech.

The journal analyzed the images and figures in the article and found three had been published previously and that an outside lab used to collect some of the data had “made a mistake by sending images of other work in the service lab,” according to the retraction notice.

Alhakamy’s spate of retractions started in November 2022 after PubPeer users started commenting on Alhakamy’s papers from 2020. Many of his articles overlapped significantly with previously published work or included duplicated photos and figures.

In the following weeks, the blog For Better Science published a story about fraudulent researchers that mentioned Alhakamy and his prolific publishing. The Saudi scientist has published 219 papers since 2020, for a rate of more than an article per week since 2020.

According to his LinkedIn page, Alhakamy founded the Drug Research and Pharmaceutical Industries Center at King AbdulAziz University in 2020. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

One of Alhakamy’s frequent co-authors is his KAU colleague Usama Fahmy, whose publishing record also includes several retractions. Retraction Watch was unable to reach Fahmy or any other co-authors on these retracted papers.

Exclusive: Elsevier to retract paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

A paper on green innovation that drew sharp rebuke for using questionable and undisclosed methods to replace missing data will be retracted, its publisher told Retraction Watch.

Previous work by one of the authors, a professor of economics in Sweden, is also facing scrutiny, according to another publisher.

As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.”

Heshmati and his coauthor, Mike Tsionas, a professor of economics at Lancaster University in the UK who died recently, made no mention of missing data or how they dealt with them in their 2023 article, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” Instead, the paper gave the impression of a complete dataset. One economist argued in a guest post on our site that there was “no justification” for such lack of disclosure.

Elsevier, in whose Journal of Cleaner Production the study appeared, moved quickly on the new information. A spokesperson for the publisher told us yesterday: “We have investigated the paper and can confirm that it will be retracted.”

We first contacted Heshmati after a PhD student tipped us off about his dubious research practices. The student had obtained Heshmati’s dataset, which, along with email correspondence between the professor and the student, revealed how Heshmati had approached the numerous missing observations in the data. It’s a mistake Heshmati has made twice, it turns out.