The editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later. The notices call the plagiarism a "severe abuse of the scientific publishing system."

Ubaid ur Rehman, the first or only author of all three papers, previously had two other articles retracted from Springer Nature journals for plagiarism. Salvador Pineda, one of the authors whose work was lifted, said he was “relieved” considering how much time and energy he invested in getting the paper that plagiarized his work retracted.

The "delays" referred to by Elsevier resulted in the plagiarized papers accumulating several new citations, about two dozen since June 2023.