Chemist has 35 papers retracted within 2 years

A chemistry researcher has had 35 of his papers retracted within 24 months for a variety of reasons.

According to the retraction notices, the reasons include fundamental errors in chemical analyses, compromised peer review, image-related problems, and citation manipulation. The retracted articles were mostly published in journals run by Elsevier and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The retractions earn Hitler Louis a place on a leaderboard of scientists with the most retractions to their names. It was created by the research integrity blog Retraction Watch, which was first to report on the case.

Louis didn’t reply to a request for comment.

According to Retraction Watch, Louis’s LinkedIn profile until recently listed him as a student due to complete a doctoral degree in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in 2027. But that affiliation was scrubbed from the profile, along with others, including the University of Calabar and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“There was no intent to misrepresent results,” Innocent Benjamin, Louis’s coauthor on 19 of the retracted papers and a recent master’s graduate in biotechnology, biological, and biomedical sciences from the University of Portsmouth, tells Retraction Watch. 

“The issue concerned visual presentation and interpretability rather than generation of artificial data,” Benjamin says.