Sayed Mohamed Eldin has published 61 papers and 2022 and 378 in 2023. In 2024, he has published 24 papers. We recently wrote about this, which you can read about here.
One of those papers has been retracted due to authors being added to the paper without explanation and without editorial approval. You can see the retraction note here. We have to ask, why the paper has to be retracted.
The reasons for the retraction were given as follows:
“In investigating concerns brought up regarding the authenticity of the article, the editor reached out to the authors for an explanation.
Furthermore, the editor discovered suspicious changes in authorship between the original submission and the revised version of this paper. In summary, the author names Nevzat Akkurt, Mustafa Z. Mahmoud and ElSayed M. Tag El Din were added to the revised paper without explanation and without exceptional approval by the editor, which is contrary to the journal policy on changes to authorship.
The authors failed to provide a satisfactory explanation to the above points.“
The retraction notice also linked to a PubPeer comment.
Could/should not (at least some) of this been picked up during the peer review process?
Looking at Scopus, Eldin has published at least 195 articles in Elsevier journals. Will Elsevier investigate all of these papers?
The other alternative is that “we” (whoever that is) raise Expression of Concerns for all of these papers which i) wastes our time and ii) wastes editorial time at #Elsevier.
#Elsevier have the information about changes in authors (or not) and they could easily identify the papers that should be further investigated, and assume that the others are okay.
“We” don’t have access to this information, so can only raise an Expression of Concern about EVERY paper. Not only is this a waste of time, but it also makes “us” look like we are on a witch hunt.
Suggested Call to Action
- Elsevier ask the EiCs of the journals where Eldin has published, and identify whether there was a change to the list of authors, when this was done and did it receive editorial approval?
- Once Elsevier have this information, then they can decide how to proceed.
- The offer is there for us to help however we can, but you would need to provide us with the information we would need for our help to be effective.