Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on Retraction Watch leaderboard. The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses.

Two of the retraction notices also point to compromised peer review. These include one in Heliyon in which reviewers had asked for redundant references to their own papers, and another in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry, where editors expressed “significant doubts about the objectivity and thoroughness of the reviews conducted.”

A spokesperson for Elsevier, the publisher of these journals, said the reviewers had provided “biased and inaccurate reviews,” resulting in “flawed” articles. “It was subsequently determined that the issues identified warranted retraction rather than a corrigendum,” the spokesperson said. Twenty of Louis’ 35 retractions come from Elsevier journals. The spokesperson said they found out about the issues from a whistleblower and that investigation is still ongoing.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/02/24/chemist-hitler-louis-nigeria-retractions-image-duplication-self-citation/

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now