Academic’s effort to correct paper triggers retraction

A dean at an Australian university sought to correct some of his papers. He received a retraction instead, reports Retraction Watch.

We wrote last year about Marcel Dinger, dean of science at the University of Sydney, who was a coauthor on five papers with multiple references that had been retracted. In May 2024, Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan, had flagged the papers on PubPeer for “references of questionable reliability”. Magazinov credited the Problematic Paper Screener with helping him find them. Dinger told us at the time he intended to work with editors to determine whether the five papers should be corrected or retracted.

This May, one of the papers, published in 2021 in The Journal of Drug Targeting, was retracted – with a statement that the authors didn’t agree with the decision. The article has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Full report on the Retraction Watch site