Daniel Bar-Shalom, a pharmacist at the University of Copenhagen, was incensed. He’d been asked to review a manuscript by Muhammad Imran Qadir, an associate professor at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, Pakistan. According to his institution’s website, Qadir was the “top pharmaceutical scientist” in the country. But Bar-Shalom thought the introduction to the paper felt like it could have been written by a student. The real problems started in the middle of the article, however, in what Bar-Shalom came to think of as “the fill of a shit sandwich.” There, sprinkled throughout the text, were several irrelevant and trivial sentences.

When Bar-Shalom looked up the references that followed each of these bland sentences, Qadir’s name appeared on every article. Although mentioning one’s previous work is not necessarily inappropriate, excessive self-citation can be considered “a potential attempt to manipulate” an author’s h-index, according to the Committee on Publication Ethics. Qadir has a Google Scholar h-index of 70, but his profile includes dozens of papers by another researcher named Muhammad Imran. Disgusted, Bar-Shalom suggested rejecting the manuscript, which Qadir had submitted to Elsevier’s Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology in 2024. The journal agreed.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/05/12/reviewer-finds-top-pharmaceutical-scientist-has-a-self-citation-problem/

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