Exclusive: Whistleblower fired after raising concerns about journal articles on LinkedIn

Muhammad Mohsin Butt A business school in Pakistan has fired a marketing professor after finding he had “damaged the repute” of the university and its scholarly journal, Retraction Watch has learned.  In a LinkedIn post, Muhammad Mohsin Butt, the now-fired professor, shared a picture of the table of contents of a 2015 issue of Business Review, published by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), in Karachi. The contents listed seven case studies authored by two other professors at the school:  The two authors are still employed at IBA: Nasir Afghan as an assistant professor of marketing, and Mohammad Asad Ilyas as registrar.  The journal issue “once existed but was taken back immediately after its release internally,” the school’s inquiry found, although the articles’ authors and a former editor of the journal deny this action constituted retraction.  Hilal Butt (no relation to Mohsin Butt), chair of IBA’s finance department and the editor of IBA Business Review at the time of the LinkedIn post, replied with a link to the online table of contents for the issue. The webpage showed different article titles and authors, and Hilal Butt wrote that “there is nothing published anything as reported.”  Afghan, Ilyas, and Hilal Butt
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