Retracted papers by Iranian authors: Causes, journals, time lags, affiliations, collaborations
Ali Ghorbi, Mohsen Fazeli-Varzaneh, Erfan Ghaderi-Azad, Marcel, Ausloos, and Marcin Kozak

TL;DR
This study analyzes 343 retracted papers involving Iranian authors from 2001-2019, highlighting causes like fake peer review and plagiarism, and examining factors such as time lags, journal distribution, and institutional contributions.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of retraction causes, timelines, and institutional roles in Iranian scientific publications, emphasizing weaknesses in peer review processes.
Findings
Most retractions due to fake peer review and plagiarism.
Average retraction time was 591 days.
Islamic Azad University contributed over half of retractions.
Abstract
This study aims to analyze 343 retraction notices indexed in the Scopus database, published in 2001-2019, related to scientific articles (co-)written by at least one author affiliated with an Iranian institution. In order to determine reasons for retractions, we merged this database with the database from Retraction Watch. The data were analyzed using Excel 2016 and IBM-SPSS version 24.0, and visualized using VOSviewer software. Most of the retractions were due to fake peer review (95 retractions) and plagiarism (90). The average time between a publication and its retraction was 591 days. The maximum time-lag (about 3,000 days) occurred for papers retracted due to duplicate publications; the minimum time-lag (fewer than 100 days) was for papers retracted due to ''unspecified cause'' (most of these were conference papers). As many as 48 (14%) of the retracted papers were published in two…
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