On 24 July 2026, Research Square, the preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts submitted by Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student at Gandaki Medical College in Pokhara, Nepal, citing concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network.” The withdrawals followed an investigation by Retraction Watch, first published on 21 July 2026, into a WhatsApp-coordinated network Mahato runs called the Global Clinical Research Consortium.
The three withdrawn manuscripts each analyzed U.S. mortality trends using the CDC WONDER database. Notably, eight of the ten institutional affiliations listed across the three papers were in Pakistan, despite the underlying data and Mahato’s own location having no connection to those institutions — a pattern consistent with authorship being distributed to people who did not do the underlying analytic work.
What Retraction Watch found
According to Retraction Watch’s reporting, Mahato’s network has close to 1,000 members, coordinated through WhatsApp, and produced roughly 120 papers, conference abstracts, and posters in the twelve months between July 2025 and June 2026. Retraction Watch reviewed WhatsApp messages in which Mahato solicited “conference presenters and collaborators,” offering what the messages described as “guaranteed authorship” in exchange for either presenting an abstract at a conference or holding an article-processing-charge fee waiver with MDPI or Frontiers. Coauthors recruited this way were predominantly based in Pakistan, with additional members reported in India, Egypt, Nigeria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Peru, and South Korea.
Output attributed to the network reportedly includes five abstracts accepted by the American Heart Association, seven ePosters accepted by the European Society for Medical Oncology, papers in journals including Clinical Cardiology, Clinical Case Reports, the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, and BMC Neurology, and 77 papers in Annals of Medicine and Surgery, one of which has already been retracted for fabricated references. Retraction Watch also reported that Annals of Medicine and Surgery has been discontinued from Scopus and placed on hold in Clarivate’s Emerging Sources Citation Index — index-level actions that predate and are broader than the Mahato case specifically, but which Retraction Watch’s reporting connects to the same quality concerns.
What is confirmed versus what remains under review
It is important to separate what has actually happened from what is still being examined. Confirmed, on the record: Research Square’s withdrawal of three named preprints on 24 July 2026, with a published notice citing paper-mill involvement; and the Global Association of Indian Medical Students (GAIMS) terminating Mahato’s position on its Axis Editorial Board “with immediate effect” on 28 July 2026, following its own internal review. Still under review, not yet concluded: the European Society for Medical Oncology told Retraction Watch it had “immediately started [an] internal investigation” into the abstracts submitted under Mahato’s name, and the American Heart Association said a review of its abstracts was “currently in progress.” Retraction Watch’s follow-up story, published 31 July 2026, does not report a formal misconduct finding against Mahato by any journal, society, or his home institution, and does not report that Gandaki Medical College has taken disciplinary action.
Mahato’s response
Retraction Watch put its findings to Mahato directly. He denied that authorship was exchanged solely for conference presentation, and said presenters made “meaningful scholarly contributions,” including content review and data curation. He rejected the characterization of his network as a paper mill, describing its purpose instead as facilitating “collaborative academic research.” Retraction Watch’s 31 July follow-up also reported that the network appeared to have rebranded itself, under a new name, shortly after the original story was published — a detail that has not been independently confirmed beyond Retraction Watch’s own observation.
Retraction Watch’s reporting additionally names Shreya Singh Beniwal, described as a previously identified paper miller, as having helped administer subgroups within the network, manage manuscript sections, and solicit conference presenters. Beniwal’s specific role and any response from her are matters of Retraction Watch’s reporting and have not been independently verified by CASRAI.
Why this case is instructive
Two mechanics in this case are worth flagging for anyone responsible for authorship verification, peer review, or research-integrity screening at a journal, society, or institution:
- Authorship offered as a transaction, not earned through contribution. The alleged exchange — authorship in return for a conference presentation slot or an unrelated fee waiver — is structurally incompatible with contribution-based authorship criteria such as those set out by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which require a substantive contribution to conception, analysis, drafting, or critical revision, plus accountability for the work. A CRediT-style, role-specific disclosure at submission is one of the few practical checks that surfaces this kind of mismatch before publication rather than after.
- Mismatched affiliations as a low-cost screening signal. Eight of ten listed institutional affiliations across the withdrawn CDC WONDER papers being in Pakistan, unconnected to the U.S. government dataset being analyzed or to the submitting author’s own location, is exactly the kind of geographic-affiliation mismatch that paper-mill detection guidance (including COPE and STM Integrity Hub advisories) flags as worth routine, automatable checking.
CASRAI’s guide to preprint server misconduct and the retraction accountability gap covers the broader structural question this case raises: preprint servers generally do not conduct the same pre-publication vetting as peer-reviewed journals, so withdrawal after the fact — as happened here — is often the first formal check a preprint receives.
This account is based on Retraction Watch’s published reporting of 21 July 2026 and 31 July 2026. CASRAI has not independently verified claims beyond what is documented in that reporting, and has attributed all substantive claims to it accordingly. Where an investigation is described as ongoing, no conclusion should be inferred pending its outcome.
