The article titled “Development of Ecofriendly Corrosion Inhibitors for Application in Acidization of Petroleum Oil Well” [1] has been retracted. The article was found to contain images reused in several other articles published by Mahendra Yadav and colleagues. The details of the reuse of images are as follows: Figure 9(a) is similar to Figure 11(a) in [2], Figure 14(a) in [3], Figure 5(a) in [4], and Figure 11(a) in [5].
We asked the authors to provide the underlying uncropped and unadjusted scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images, the raw data, and details of how the experiments were conducted.
The corresponding author, Dr. Yadav, said the SEM work was outsourced but did not give details on where, when, or by whom this work was performed. The equipment is described as a “Scanning Electron Microscope model SEM Jeol JSM-5800” in this article. However, there is no description of the scanning electron microscope in [2] and in [6], and it is described as a “JEOL JSM-6380 LA analytical scanning electron microscope.” These are not the same model of the microscope, despite these articles sharing some of the same SEM images.
Dr. Yadav provided us with replacement figures. However, they were identical for two of the articles [1, 6], despite representing experiments with the inhibitors AMPT and ODAEODI, respectively. We were not told how these images were generated; the images were of low resolution and the text in the images was illegible.
The corresponding author agreed to retraction, and we have asked the institution to formally investigate.