Former acting director of national research lab in India adds another retraction

A cancer journal has retracted a paper by a former acting director of an institute in India, bringing her retraction total to nine. Chitra Mandal, a former senior researcher at the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (CSIR-IIC) at Kolkata, served as acting director in 2014-15. She also headed the CSIR’s Innovation complex between 2010 and 2015. She received multiple awards, and was also appointed a Science and Engineering Research Board Distinguished Fellow in 2018. Mandal has now lost nine articles to retraction and more than two dozen of her papers have been flagged on PubPeer, most for image irregularities or data issues in graphs. In March, Wiley’s Molecular Biology International retracted a 2011 article Mandal coauthored, also for image issues. We previously wrote about an expression of concern on a 2016 paper in which Mandal was a co-author. The latest retraction involves a 2011 paper in Leukemia Research about the movement of lymphoblasts from the bone marrow to peripheral blood in childhood leukemia. The journal retracted the paper on May 30, citing concerns that some of the data in figures appear to have been manipulated. The article was first flagged on PubPeer in 2019 by sleuth Elisabeth Bik. A journalist had contacted her asking about Mandal’s work, citing an investigation, Bik told Retraction Watch. “And then, [as] I looked at more papers by her and I found more problems.” (Note: The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch, administers the Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund.) Bik noticed certain areas on the dot charts in the paper appeared to be duplicated across figures. Another PubPeer commenter noted the “same data has been altered and used for two different time points of the experiment.” Bik didn’t report the irregularities she unearthed in Mandal’s works to the publisher in 2019, she said, but added that the authors should have got a notice from PubPeer. A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, said they were first alerted to issues with the paper in late 2023, following which, “a careful investigation was initiated in accordance with Elsevier policies and COPE guidelines.” Neither Mandal nor several of her coauthors responded to emails seeking comment. In 2021, we asked Mandal about all the flagged papers. She told us: “In discussion with other co-authors, majority of whom were my doctoral students, we communicated with the journals and addressed most of the pubpeer comments, as many of them were purely technical and the data had been misinterpreted.” A surge in research misconduct in India since 2022 led the country’s National Institutional Ranking Framework to announce in 2025 that they would penalize higher education institutes if “a significant number of research papers” published by their faculty were retracted. But Sabuj Bhattacharyya, research ethics and integrity officer at the Biotechnology Research and Innovation Council–Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine in Bengaluru, said in an interview that this needs an umbrella agency to look at research integrity across the country. Like the Office of Research Integrity in the US, or the UK Research Integrity Office. “Unless we have an agency to oversee everything…implementation [of compliance guidelines] will significantly vary across institutes and organizations,” he says. Such an agency would necessitate standard compliances that higher education institutes would be bound to, he says. “Then, there will be databases that government and funding agencies can check against.” Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].