Maarten van Kampen noticed that a certain Elsevier journal, Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE), is infested by papermill fraud. Maarten even read those papers (since nobody else did) and proved they were objectively utter garbage, and scientifically way beyond stupid. He tried reasoning with the Editor-in-Chief, a US professor named Alexander Cheng, but failed. Thus, with help of Alexander Magazinov, Maarten wrote a long article about this journal and one prominent Iranian papermill cheater it hosts: Arash Karimipour.

Due to many side characters and side stories, Maarten’s article got way too long even for For Better Science. It will be therefore published in two three parts.

As Maarten stresses, Alexander Magazinov co-authored this article and Maarten is indebted to Tu Van Duong of Purdue University for his insights in the Vietnamese university mores.

We start predictably with Part I.

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Arash Karimipour and setting Boundaries

By Maarten van Kampen and Alexander Magazinov

Alexander Magazinov recently had success in getting Masoud Afrand, a bigtime papermiller, removed from the editorial boards of Springer-Nature’s Scientific Reports and Elsevier’s Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE), read here and here. The Editor-in-Chief of the latter journal, Alexander HD Cheng, was not happy with that outcome and published his own analysis on Retraction Watch. It concludes with:

“In conclusion, concerning Afrand’s editorial work for EABE, the special issue was not an effective way for him to boost his citations, particularly in view of his very high citation record. His editorial conduct has been honorable, and I find no fault in it. The journal regrets that due to the bad publicity, justified or unjustified, we have asked Afrand to step down. He gracefully agreed.”

Comment on Retraction Watch by A. Cheng (highlights mine)

Let’s take the opportunity to recap earlier appearances of Afrand in this blog.

Act 1: Recent Advances in the Modelling of Nanotubes…

In 2020 the special issue “Recent Advances in the Modeling of Nanotubes within Nano-Structures / Systems” appeared in Wiley’s Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences. It was edited by Hamid M. Sedighi, Abdessattar Abdelkefi, Ali J. Chamkha, Timon Rabczuk, Raffaele Barretta, and Hassen M. Ouakad. The 94 articles (spreadsheet) that were supposed to be published there served mostly as citation vehicles for a narrow circle of actors. The top recipients are shown below, with Afrand in the fourth position:

Author	Citation count
Chamkha, Ali J. (FBS article)	348
He, Ji-Huan	189
Sedighi, Hamid M.	152
Afrand, Masoud	132
Ghalambaz, Mohammad	119
Karimipour, Arash	95
Sheremet, Mikhail A.	87
Pop, Ioan	80
Safaei, Mohammad Reza	80
Sheikholeslami, M.	78
Ganji, D.D.	73
Mehryan, S.A.M.	73
Kalbasi, Rasool	63
Menni, Younes	62
Ouakad, Hassen M.	60

We will encounter many of these men again. One of them, special editor and German university Vice-President Timon Rabczuk, will be the central character of Part II.

After having sacked the Wiley journal’s manager who attempted to push for investigation, a representative of Wiley promised to re-review the problematic articles. Which, of course, did not happen, and a ridiculous pile of trash is still hanging in “early view,” some pieces for almost four years already. This one, for example, is online since April 6, 2020:

Chun‐Hui He , Ji‐Huan He, Hamid M. Sedighi, Fangzhu (方诸): An ancient Chinese nanotechnology for water collection from air: History, mathematical insight, promises, and challenges, Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences (2020) doi: 10.1002/mma.6384

To be fair, one retraction happened, but that was it. And then, two years after the above, we got…

Act 2: Recent Advances in Battery Thermal Management

In 2022 the special issue “Recent Advances in Battery Thermal Management” was published in Elsevier’s Journal of Energy Storage. Special editors Masoud Afrand and his new buddy, Nader Karimi from Queen Mary University of London (a familiar place, isn’t it?) turned it into a full-scale citation orgy.

So again a table of top citation recipients, with Afrand and Karimi proudly at the top of the list:

Author	Citation count
Karimi, Nader	504
Afrand, Masoud	383
Aghakhani, Saeed	252
Tang, Yongbing	199
Pordanjani, Ahmad Hajatzadeh	189
Ali, Hafiz Muhammad	161
Kalbasi, Rasool	158
Karimipour, Arash	139
Alizadeh, Rasool	136
Torabi, Mohsen	136

The other guest editors in this affair was a Canadian star chemist papermiller Mohammad Arjmand, and a Chinese nobody Cong Qi.

The concerns about this special issue were reported in July 2022, but the Journal of Energy Storage‘s Editor-in-Chief Dirk-Uwe Sauer steadfastly delayed investigating the Special Issue. Then, for some reason, he got removed end of that same year and Elsevier actually did start an investigation. Eventually, the entire special issue was covered by an Expression of Concern for the ‘integrity and rigor of the peer review process’.

Never mind all that, because there came…

Act 3: Computational Approaches in Multiphase Simulation of Nanofluids

March 2023. Afrand has ‘earned’ a position as “regular” editor of Elsevier’s EABE, whilst also running the special issue “Computational approaches in multiphase simulation of nanofluids in multiphysics systems” in the same journal. This again with Arjmand and Qi, but without Karimi. We are now several months into the Journal of Energy Storage investigation, so one may wonder whether this was a mishap, or a deliberate decision.

In any case, the EABE special issue of Afrand was also special citation-wise, the main beneficiary this time being a certain Changhe Li. This table was prepared when there were 44 papers in the special issue, while there are nearly 60 now.

Author	Citation count
Li, Changhe	136
Zhang, Yanbin	102
Yang, Min	80
Said, Zafar	72
Afrand, Masoud	69
Ali, Hafiz Muhammad	67
Jia, Dongzhou	56
Öztop, Hakan F.	54
Selimefendigil, Fatih	50
Sharifpur, Mohsen	47

Together with Afrand, EABE also managed to hire Nader Karimi, who launched a special issue separately from Afrand. Subsequently Karimi had to “step down,” too, an outcome which The Editor-in-Chief Cheng might consider to be a result of “a coordinated attack on [him], on [his] integrity, on the journal, and the scientific field of nanofluid,” as reported in earlier Friday Shorts.

Karimipour enters the stage

As if the above is not enough, another rotten apple entered the editorial board in the same batch of new hires: Arash Karimipour. Like his fellows, he ran his own very special EABE issue and, in a repeat of steps, it turned out to be impossible to make the EABE chief editor to acknowledge that something very bad was happening to his journal. Arash is still listed as EABE editor and his special issue remains untouched.

Curriculum vitae of Arash Karimipour

For the most flattering CV of Arash one should visit his LinkedIn page:

“I am a mechanical engineer with a strong interest in performing complex flow physics research. I actively participated in research projects focusing on rheological behavior, mixed convection, non-Newtonian nanofluids, and entropy generation. The findings of these investigations have been published in reputable international journals, and Stanford University has recognized my accomplishments by naming me one of the World’s Top 2% Scientists for 2020 and 2021. I was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science in 2019, and ISC gave me the same honor in 2018.
With my expertise in mechanical engineering and unwavering commitment to advancing the understanding of complex flow physics, I bring significant value to any research team. I am enthusiastic about applying my skills and contributing to cutting-edge projects within this industry.”

At the same time one can find a different story in the darker places on Internet:

“Sara Rostami is from the “second” generation of Iranian nano-fraud, the same generation as Masoud Afrand, Davood Toghraie and Arash Karimipour. For the context, the “first” generation are the two Babol Noshirvani gurus, Davood Domiri Ganji and Mohsen Sheikholeslami. … The main story about them is plain and simple: they appeared out of nowhere around 2015 and began churning out nanofluid-themed papers.“

Alexander Magazinov, For Better Science

Both CVs are perfectly correct, except maybe the part on the unwavering commitment to advancing understanding.

Arash Karimipour did his BSc in mechanical engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Esfahan, Iran (2001-2005). This was followed by a MSc (2005-2007) and PhD (2007-2012) at different branches of the same university. Since 2010 Arash is associate professor at the Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch. During his PhD Karimipour spend time at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy in the group of Annunziata d’Orazio. This led to a mutually beneficial relation that I will discuss in Part III.

Scientific output

Much can be learned by looking at a researcher’s scientific output. The figure below focuses on quantity, showing the yearly number of papers published by Karimipour:

It can be seen that his productivity steeply rises around 2015 or, in Magazinov’s words, “they appeared out of nowhere around 2015″. The split in affiliations shows a surprise: a one-year stint at a Vietnamese university in 2020 (orange line), an important international experience that is completely missing from his CV. In 2020 Arash published an impressive 79 papers, or about 1.5 paper per week. And nearly half of these papers he signed with a Vietnamese Ton Duc Thang University affiliation.

Karimipour is not alone in having a “Vietnamese period”. The output of his Islamic Azad buddy and frequent co-author Masoud Afrand shows the exact same pattern. And the same holds for Iskander Tlili (read about him here) and Shahaboddin Shamshirband:

This surprising coincidence is related to a cheaper version of Saudi Arabia’s citation fraud that was uncovered by El Pais last year. In that latter scheme Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers got paid up to €70,000 to lie about their affiliation, by that boosting the rankings of Saudi Universities. That citation balloon has now deflated. Vietnamese universities are also interested in boosting their ranking and started paying any papermiller they could find to increase ‘production’. This scheme was exposed around 2020 with a Vietnamese national newspaper calling out Iskander Tlili and Shamshirband as “the ringleaders of the foreign scientific mafia network that is sucking the blood of Vietnamese universities“. Together with some follow up that ended the scheme, causing a steep drop in ‘Vietnamese articles’ from our fraudulent scientists. The most ruthless members have their snouts in both troughs. Timon Rabczuk, special editor in Act 1 above, is one of those. As announced, he will be the star of Part II.

In the above story Aliakbar Karimipour from the Vietnamese Duy Tan University also deserves mentions (bottom-right panel in the figure above). This other A. Karimipour has no internet presence and truly out of nothing published his first 18 papers in 2020. Aliakbar publishes most often with… Arash Karimipour. The two co-authored 10 papers in 2020, but that cooperation abruptly ended in 2021. Evil tongues suggest that Arash and Aliakbar are in fact one and the same person, cashing twice for their Ton Duc Thang (Arash) and Duy Tan (Aliakbar) affiliations. In that respect I find it interesting to see that in 2022 our Arash published a final Vietnamese paper, but then with a Duy Tan affiliation. A mix-up in his managing of personae? 

Aliakbar Karimipour is incidentally not the only ‘ghost’ in the Vietnamese affiliation fraud. This newspaper article covers Narjes Nabipour, the affiliation alter-ego of Shamshirband. And later in this post we will meet Zahra Abelmalek, an affiliation-ghost linked to Iskander Tlili.

Back to scientific output. Not only quantity, but also quality counts. And retractions are a clear indication of the lack thereof. Karimipour thus far has two retractions (Li et al 2020, He et al 2019), both from April 2022 in the same Emerald journal:

The first retraction notice mentions authorship- and peer-review fraud mixed with plagiarism as the reason for retraction:

It has come to our attention that there are concerns regarding the authorship of the paper and that the peer review process was compromised.

Portions of the article are also taken, without attribution, from the following source:

Jamshidian, M. and Mousavi, S.A. (2014), “Predicting Failure in the Hydraulic Lift Structures with Monitoring and Fuzzy Logic”, Journal of Modern Processes in Manufacturing and Production, Vol. 3 No. 2.

Retraction note of Develop a numerical approach of fuzzy logic type-2 to improve the reliability of a hydraulic automated guided vehicles.

The second retracted paper only suffered from authorship- and peer-review fraud. The papers have notable co-authors that we will see more often: Vietnamese superman Iskander Tlili, Marjan Goodarzi, and Zhixiong Li. And would you know: our Zhixiong was a major contributor to our Act II Recent Advances in Battery Thermal Management special issue. Until last week, when retractions for authorship-, review-, and citation-fraud struck [1, 2, 3].

Another inverse-quality indicator is the number of papers flagged on PubPeer. Making sure not to include the other fraudulent Arash Karimipour one can currently find 44 papers flagged. Which is obviously a lot. A frequently occurring issue is batch citations to irrelevant works, a hallmark of citation fraud.

Arash’s most frequent co-author is Masoud Afrand. Arash and Masoud are both affiliated with the Islamic Azad University of Najafabad and work in the same field. They have co-authored 54 papers together, making Afrand (co-)author on 20% of Arash’ papers. And Masoud is mostly besting Arash, always flying that bit higher:

• Masoud has 48 papers listed on PubPeer, Arash 44.
• Masoud has an h-index of 96, Arash one of 83.
• In this Nafajabad university ranking Masoud sits first, and Arash second place.
• Masoud has already been fired from two editorial boards, Arash is just being investigated.

The special issue

The main focus of this post is Karimipour’s Special Issue “Recent trends and new developments in Molecular Dynamics and Lattice Boltzmann Methods” in the journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE). Most of its papers were published in 2023, just like those of Afrands EABE ‘Act 3’ Special Issue. Together these two special issues contributed to more than 25% of the journal’s output in 2023.

When Alexander Magazinov started raising concerns, the question of editorship of the Special Issue seemed simple: both Arash Karimipour and Amir Mosavi were listed as its special editors. However, November 2023 Mosavi’s name was silently removed:

Based on citation patterns we can however be sure that Mosavi was involved in one way or the other.

Karimipour’s Special Issue contains 73 papers, excluding a first retraction notice. For the past few months no new papers have been added so we can hope it stays at this. The published papers show frequently recurring authors, with e.g. a certain S. Mohammad Sajadi publishing more than 1/5^th of all of the Special Issue’s papers:

About 2/3 of the Special Issue papers (48 total) are currently listed on PubPeer. Way too many to cover, so let’s look at some groups:

“Last block” citation fraud

One can pick almost any paper in the Special issue and find out-of-context citations. Those are boring and editors are anyway not interested in this¹. The citation patterns of the special issue as a whole are somewhat interesting:

The above list shows a ‘no holds barred’ approach to citation fraud, with our Special Issue editor Karimipour receiving more than double the amount of citation as the number two. The names should already sound familiar: “appeared out of nowhere” Davood Toghraie, superman Iskander Tlili and Marjan Goodarzi from Karimipour’s retractions, Islamic Azad buddy Afrand, and even nanofluid super-villain Ali J. Chamkha. And with Mohammad Safaei being the husband of Marjan Goodarzi we have quite a family here.

The citation fraud in this Special Issue comes with an extremely lazy twist: at least eleven of its papers cite all remaining citations from a single sentence, out-of-context. Take the snippet below from Using phase change material (PCM) to …:

Somewhere in the results section the authors cite Refs. [34-66] in a single sentence. This is batch-citing of 33 papers or 50% of the total 66 references. It is hard to see their relevance, but it is nearly impossible to miss the pattern: just check the highlighted authors for the first and last reference.

It is also easy to guess how this could happen. In the citation-for-sale business there must be lists of papers that need citing. When a fresh paper comes in it is horribly unhandy to insert these citations and then have to renumber all the references. But there is no need for that: being in full editorial control it is far easier to add the payload at the end!

To far fetched, you think? Look at the three Special Issue papers below:

Each of these papers has a last block of citations that is cited from a single sentence. And in each paper one can find the exact same block of 12 ‘Karimipour’ citations, even in the exact same order. The remaining citations of the above three papers predominantly go to husband & wife Goodarzi & Safaei.

Fun fact: did you know that Karimipour authored a scholarly paper on publication ethics? It is about mandatory citations during the submission process. I am pretty sure he now is fully OK with that concept:

Earlier, I mentioned that EABE removed Amir Mosavi’s name as special editor. His legacy is, however, clearly visible:

Eleven ‘Mosavi’ references are cited in the exact same order from two papers, both in the “last block”, out-of-context, and from a single sentence. And another ten of these eleven can be found in the “last block” batch of this paper. They are not listed in the above figure as ‘only’ six of them come in the same order… Looking a bit closer at the above citation lists one can spot many more great scammers, for example the fraudster Shamshirband and even our German university Vice-President Rabczuk ([49], see Part II). And when you are missing superman Tlili: he ‘earned’ his “Last block” of citations here.

The above examples are the heavyweights of the citation fraud. There is however also much beauty in minor offenders. Take the Special Issue paper Molecular dynamics analysis of a flavoring drum combining numerical simulation and experimental evaluation. Its ultimate author is Zhixong Li whom we already met on one of Karimipour’s retracted works. The paper has a measly 27 references, with only the last 5 of them cited out-of-context from a single sentence:

The person appending the add-on citations felt the need for discreteness and used the et al. trick to hide many of the cited authors. This way it is not directly apparent that Refs. [23] (2020) and [24] (2021) go to the exact same set of authors, including “appeared out of nowhere” Davood Toghraie. These two papers use the same make-belief molecular dynamics fraud as many of the current Special Issue papers:

When you think that above molecular dynamics snapshots are in fact Photoshop constructs using a fixed pattern of red water molecules combined with some decorations then I believe you are right. Note that on PubPeer Zhixong Li assures us that these two cited papers are relevant, but maybe not the best choice.

The issues with the minor offender do not end here. The paper appears to have been published earlier as Design of “five-section” flavoring cylinder based on numerical simulation in a Chinese-only journal. Many of its authors are shared, but authors Paolo Gardoni (3 PubPeer entries) and Grzegorz Królczyk (5 PubPeer entries) were added to the Special Issue version. The earlier published version is obviously not cited…

The exact same flavoring drum was also optimized in the paper Measuring Liquid Droplet Size in Two-Phase Nozzle Flow Employing Numerical and Experimental Analyses. In this case a different element of the machine is optimized, but it is still very odd that the paper is not cited: it shares three authors with and was published four months before the special issue paper was submitted.

Milling

The business of selling authorships and citations needs a steady supply of paper-shaped vehicles. It is most efficient to produce these in assembly lines that focus on a narrow topic. The special issue contains many ‘series’ that each appear to have been written by a single author: a ‘Perovskite mill‘ of 12 papers (9 in the SI), a ‘Combustion mill‘ of 5 papers (2 in the SI), and a ‘Phenol/Formaldehyde mill‘ of 6 papers (6 in the SI)².

The ‘Perovskite mill‘ is by far the largest. A perovskite is a material that has the molecular formula ABX₃. There is a wide choice of elements A, B, and X and that makes for endless variations: ideal milling material!

Date	Journal	Title	Wind
2023.11	EABE	An approach using molecular dynamics to connect biomaterials with solar systems to increase the amount of renewable energy: App…	x
2023.11	EABE	Molecular dynamic study of perovskite with improved thermal and mechanical stability for solar cells application: Calculation t…	x
2023.10	EABE	Novel study of perovskite materials and the use of biomaterials to further solar cell application in the built environment: A m…	x
2023.07	EABE	Theoretical investigation of the mechanical properties of perovskite at various environmental factors change for application in…	x
2023.05	EABE	High-efficiency perovskite photovoltaic system performance by molecular dynamics method: Optimizing electron transport thicknes…	x
2023.04	EABE	Investigation of mechanical response of CH3NH3GeIxBr3-x perovskite, under tensile stress, in the solar application for various …	x
2023.03	EABE	The significance and effectiveness of combining integrated photovoltaic systems and biomaterials to improve renewable energy ut…	x
2023.03	Molecular Physics	Theoretical investigation of the mechanical properties of single- and multi-layer CH<sub>3</sub>NH<sub>3</sub>XI<sub>3</sub> (X…
2023.02	EABE	A numerical study of CsSnIxBr3-x perovskite material as an electron transport layer (ETL), in the perovskite solar cell of a ph…
2022.12	EABE	Develop a molecular dynamics approach to simulate the single-/multi-layer CsGeX3 (X = I, Cl, and Br) perovskite stress-strain s…	x
2022.11	Molecular Physics	Simulations of lead-free organic–inorganic perovskites under tensile/compressive loads and different force fields
2021.12	Molecular Physics	Carbon doped lead-free perovskite with superior mechanical and thermal stability	x

The Perovskite mill appears to have started with the bottommost paper: Carbon doped lead-free perovskite with superior mechanical and thermal stability by Bita Farhadi. Farhadi is incidentally fifth-most cited author of the Special Issue. The seminal perovskite paper purports to calculate the mechanical strength of a number of perovskites using molecular dynamics. It introduces most of the ‘elements’ and especially errors that one can find in the full series.

In each and every perovskite paper the authors stretch their materials and then measure how hard it ‘pulls back’. The stretching is called tensile strain and is expressed as the relative change in length, Δx/x. The ‘pulling back’ is called stress. The figure below shows some stress-strain curves of that seminal paper:

The tensile strain of 1, 2, 3, … on the horizontal axis means that the authors elongated their material in one direction by a factor 2, 3, 4, … And that is something that even a rubber band would not survive: it is just nonsense.

The initial slope of the stress-strain curves, indicated by the dotted lines, is called the Young’s modulus Y. The tabulated values highlighted in yellow in Table 2 above nicely correspond to the slopes in the stress-strain graphs. And these values are not unreasonable, or in the authors’ words:

“The Young’s modulus in the X direction for CH3NH3SnI3: PCBM, CH3NH3SnI2Br: PCBM, and CH3NH3SnIBr2: PCBM
structures are 35.539, 31.992, and 16.222 GPa, respectively, which are consistent with the practical results [52].”

Farhadi et al 2021, page 7

This excludes that the authors meant to express their strain as a percentage. Also the spaghetti-shaped MD box in Figure 5 leaves no doubt about the extreme stretching. Shouldn’t authors or reviewers have wondered about the white-blue molecules floating freely in that simulation box? Like: am I really looking at a solid material or are the authors pulling on a gas? These results are just unphysical nonsense.

The above ‘mistake’ went into the template of the mill and is reproduced in all papers, see the collage below. Also appreciate how similar the figures look, especially when realizing that the three figures with a grid (1, 3, 7) are published outside the EABE SI:

The perovskite mill comes with a funny bit on wind effects. This study item was already introduced in the very first Bita Farhadi paper:

The authors state to be concerned about the effect of wind on the perovskite material when it is used as a solar panel. And to take this into account they apply pressures of ‘low vacuum’, 100, and 200 MPa during their stress-strain testing. Let’s ignore the fact that this will say noting about wind effects and just focus on the magnitude of the numbers:

The left table comes from the paper Explosions and refugee chambers and tells us that a 0.14 MPa overpressure corresponds to 500 mph wind speeds and a near-100% fatality rate. So 200 MPa is a bit of a stretch for wind effects. Or maybe the perovskite solar panels are designed to work at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At a 10 km depth one reaches a pressure of ~100 MPa. The 200 MPa number thus gives a nice factor two safety margin for operating solar panels in that pitch-dark place. And the ‘low vacuum’ simulation then obviously covers the wind effects experienced by satellites.

Also the above mishap went into the template and the exact same ‘low vacuum, 100 MPa, and 200 MPa’ scheme is regurgitated in nine of its papers, see the ‘wind’ column in the table above. And this without any further explanation and with most of them having no authors in common.

Sometimes the (singular) writer of the series does not even bother to keep the text original:

The above papers Novel study of… and The significance and effectiveness of… have more than a bit similar abstracts, introductions, and even results sections. And on top of that share 25 of their ~50 citations. Do you still remember that “no longer special editor” Amir Mosavi? In The significance and effectiveness of… paper he receives 12 out-of-context citations, hidden using the et al. trick.. Graphically this gifting of more than 20% of the paper’s citations looks like this:

Also presumed series author Bita Farhadi is a common citation recipient in the series, with her citations often coming in the same blocks.

The Combustion mill is another series that made its way in to the SI. It purports to study the combustion of nanoparticles with some coating added to them. I identified 5 papers, 2 of which are published in the EABE SI:

Date	Journal	Title	Authors
2023.08	Mat. Tod. Comm.	Effective parameters on the combustion performance of coated aluminum hydride nanoparticles: A molecular dynamics study	Cao Fenghong, Mohammed Al‐Bahrani, Drai Ahmed Smait, Noor Karim, Ibrahim Mourad Mohammed, Abdullah Khaleel Ibrahim, Hassan Raheem Hassan, Salema K. Hadrawi, Ali H. Lafta, Ahmed S. Abed, As’ad Alizadeh, Navid Nasajpour-Esfahani, Maboud Hekmatifar
2023.07	EABE	The effect of penetrated oxygen particles on combustion time of coated Al hydride nanoparticles in an oxygenated medi…	Navid Habibollahi, Aidy Ali, S. Mohammad Sajadi, Davood Toghraie, Sobhan Emami, Mustafa Inc
2023.05	EABE	Molecular dynamics simulation of combustion behavior of coated aluminum hydride nanoparticles in the oxygenated mediu…	Navid Habibollahi, Aidy Ali, S. Mohammad Sajadi, Davood Toghraie, Sobhan Emami, Mohamad Shahgholi, Mustafa İnç
2022.08	J. of Mol. Liq.	Atomic coatings effects on the combustion of aluminium hydride nanoparticles dispersed in liquid oxygen: Molecular dy…	Navid Habibollahi, Aidy Ali, Arash Karimipour, Davood Toghraie, Sobhan Emami
2022.07	J. of Mol. Liq.	Molecular dynamics simulation the effect of initial pressure on the phase transition performance of coated AlH3 nanop…	Shanshan Jiang, Saade Abdalkareem Jasim, Svetlana Danshina, Mustafa Z. Mahmoud, Wanich Suksatan, Davood Toghraie, Maboud Hekmatifar, Roozbeh Sabetvand

Four of the five papers have “appeared out of nowhere” Toghraie as author, and the Atomic coatings… paper even features our editor Arash Karimipour. The individual papers have plenty of issues that become apparent at even cursory inspection. In the example below the authors put a ⌀40 nm particle in a 20x20x20 nm³ (Tardis-like) simulation box:

Apart from the topic and make-belief MD simulations the papers also share data. An example:

Figure 4 at the right comes from the last paper in the series. It contains four curves: three are taken from Karimipour’s paper that was published a year earlier, the fourth comes from one of the EABA combustion papers. And no, there is no overlap in authors.

The milly nature of the papers can also be deduced from the hilarious cast of its first episode:

Molecular dynamics lowlights

There are too many papers flagged to cover them all. Below a few lowlights to get the general flavour, starting with authors mixing up their materials.

In the paper Effect of initial temperature and pressure on thermal behavior of ethanol/oxygen fuel… the authors purport to apply shock waves to combust oxygen-ethanol mixtures. In their Fig. 1 they indeed show an oxygen (O₂) molecule. But in the simulation snapshots in Fig. 4 the oxygen has become water (H₂O), making the claimed combustion very much impossible:

And no, the mixture did not burn as there is no CO₂ to be found.

In Using phase change material (PCM) to improve the solar energy capacity of… the authors state to use decane (C₁₀H₂₂) as their phase change material. And then show a dodecane (C₁₂H₂₆) molecule in the inset. Potayto, potahto?

The special issue contains two papers on Alzheimer’s disease, as if that field has not seen enough fraud. The paper A molecular dynamic approach to a hypothesis on the dynamical behavior of Rosuvastatin on Alzheimer’s disease… purports to investigate the interaction of the anti-cholesterol medication Rosuvastatin with Alzheimer’s plaques. Apart from doing rubbish the authors start of with the wrong molecule:

The graphics department was on vacation when the paper Investigating the thermal behavior of aluminum-oxygen mixture in the presence of Cu walls… was written. The authors needed a 3D rendering of their simulation domain, but only had some 2D images lying around. No problem: just stretch one dimension (left panel):

The two animated molecular dynamics snapshots at the right are Photoshopped like the Toghraie papers shown earlier: combine a foreground of yellow ‘molecule’ balls with a shifting background of purple ‘particle’ balls. But being low on foregrounds and without graphical support the authors used the eraser tool to create some extra ‘trenches’ (red arrows).

The stench of papermills is never far away. Below figures from three papers showing heat flux versus something. Except that the vertical axis reads “Heat Flax”. The first paper has unique authors, the last two papers share the author Ali Abdollahi (12 PubPeer entries). Does this suggest that Ali also wrote the first paper? Or is he innocent of any writing and just a frequent buyer of authorships?

It is hard to show the senseless stupidity of the molecular dynamics genre that is published in Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements. And I have not only fraud in mind, but also the senseless permutations: change the fluid, particle type, particle size, wall material, …, press print, and submit. Take the below snippet from Effect of microchannel wall dimensions…:

“By studying and reviewing the research done so far, it can be seen that few studies have been done in determining the thermal properties of EG fluid in a two-dimensional platinum MC using the MD simulation [16–19]”

Effect of microchannel wall dimensions and temperature on ethylene glycol…

Yes, we have a serious issue here. For one, Refs. [16-19] are not about EG (ethylene glycol). And why (why, why) would anyone be interested in that EG-platinum combination? What do the authors expect to achieve? How did they chose their microchannel dimensions? Why did they forget to compare their results to these other ‘few studies’? Expect no answers, just Photoshop:

The author(s) received a short stretch of platinum-looking balls from the graphics department and fabricated the ‘front view’ at the right. And then used that same stretch (black rectangle) to fabricate the ‘side view’ shown at the left. The side view should be exactly 2x longer, but alas: the second ‘red molecules’ image from the graphics department was a bit short. But no worries, also physicists know how to do splicing:

Just suppose the authors actually did what they promised: calculate the thermal conductivity of an extremely narrow platinum channel filled with ethylene glycol for four channel heights and five temperatures. Is that really worth publishing? The authors solved no conceivable practical problem. And it takes some 30 minutes to change the wall material from platinum to any of >40 other metals or a near-infinite number of alloys. Why would any editor want to see this published?

Footnotes

1. Fellow sleuths find that reporting those leads nowhere: authors are simply offered to correct by removing the offending material.

4. The actual extent of the phenol/formaldehyde/… mill is larger. It very likely includes also the molecular dynamics papers citing a dialysis editorial. And I believe another few papers in the SI.

Alexander Magazinov co-authored the article and Maarten is indebted to Tu Van Duong (Purdue University) for his insights in the Vietnamese university mores.

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