Maximilian Lackner, a technical chemist and process engineer at FH Technikum Wien in Austria until October last year, according to his ORCID profile, was the senior and corresponding author on a paper in npj Science of Food retracted in January, 2026 after publishers discovered the five of the cited references weren’t relevant to the claims they were meant to be supporting.

Now Lackner is under investigation by his former university, a national research integrity agency and the publisher Elsevier, while scrutiny of his publication record has broadened to include more papers flagged on PubPeer.

Among Lackner’s articles flagged on PubPeer is one 2025 paper in Scientific Reports that cites X-ray diffraction measurements on Mars as a reference for information about herbal medicines in underdeveloped communities. Another article flagged on PubPeer received a lengthy correction after a commenter pointed out that some of the data in the graphs did not match the text in the paper. Another, published in Elsevier’s Industrial Crops and Products, appears to have reused images from a previously published paper.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/04/23/maximilian-lackner-chemist-retraction-two-investigations/

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