This is the third and (possibly) last instalment of Maarten van Kampen‘s great treatise which arose from one single Special Issue at the Elsevier journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE).
This time, we will go to the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, where the fraudster Arash Karimipour became faculty member and where papermilling became the standard way of doing science.
You can read Part I and Part II here:
Karimipour Saga I: Setting Boundaries
“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.” – Maarten van Kampen
Karimipour Saga II: Vietnamese Bauhaus
“[Timon Rabczuk] is happily accepting 2 million euro of European money, whilst at the same time optimizing his return-on-investment on Vietnamese affiliation scam and cashing in on his ‘highly cited researcher’ accolades by also posing as King Saud researcher.” – Maarten van Kampen
And I decided to make Maarten’s article even longer by adding a Coda about another Sapienza papermiller, a Renowned Stool named Pippo.
Karimipour Saga III: All roads lead to Rome
By Maarten van Kampen
The Sapienza University of Rome plays an interesting role in this story. Arash Karimipour spent part of his PhD at Sapienza, in the group of Annunziata d’Orazio. From 2010 he is full-time employed at the Islamic Azad University, but is frequently invited to Sapienza as visiting scientist. Since January 2024 he is even listed as teaching staff of foreign universities. Karimipour used his Sapienza affiliation in lieu of his Islamic Azad University one to get on the editorial board of Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE):
In his publishing something similar happens, see the table below. Of the 30 papers he published with his Sapienza affiliation only 2 were co-authored with his prime Sapienza contact, Annunziata D’Orazio (2nd column). The other 28 Sapienza-signed papers often have Karimipour as the sole Western author. And however bad this may be, the use of a Western affiliation may affect the acceptance rate.
Karimipour authored 26 papers with his Sapienza mentor D’Orazio in which he uses his Islamic Azad or Ton Duc Thang affiliation (2nd row). Below an interesting example featuring just three authors:
In this 2020 paper, Karimipour is from Ton Duc Thang university, D’Orazio from Sapienza, and first author Zahra Abdelmalek from Duy Tan university. Zahra has seven papers flagged on PubPeer, five of them published in EABE. She holds the special distinction of co-authoring the first paper that got retracted from the special issue:
The paper was flagged on PubPeer because it appeared in an authorship-for-sale add on Twitter, reproduced at the right. And according to the retraction notice our Zahra was one of the four authors buying a authorship seat… For later reference I have also highlighted S. Mohammad Sajadi (40 PubPeer entries, 17 papers in the SI), Mustafa Inc (11 PubPeer Entries, 13 papers in the SI), and Quynh Hoang Le (11 PubPeer entries, 10 papers in the SI).
Both Zahra Abdelmalek and Quynh Hoang Le feature in a Vietnamese newspaper article from September 2023 that covers the above retraction (hat tip to Tu van Duong). The reporter finds that Quynh has been fired from Duy Tan University and that Zahra is a ‘ghost’. Despite her using a Duy Tan affiliation she was never on the university’s payroll. And just like Arash’ imaginary twin “Aliakbar Karimipour” (read Part I), also “Zahra Abdelmalek” has no history: she suddenly appeared in 2020 by publishing her first 39(!) papers. The papermill entrepreneur Iskander Tlili was found to be her most frequent co-author and thus is likely her affiliation milker. In that recent Vietnamese newspaper article Tlili is no longer called a superman, but “a dealer who sold hundreds of articles to a number of universities in Vietnam“.
Did I already say that something is very off with that EABE special issue, Karimipour, and his co-authors?
Annunziata D’Orazio
The academic career of associate professor Annunziata D’Orazio is tightly coupled to that of Karimipour since she hosted him at Sapienza. Of the 57 papers she declared authorship for, 25 (44%) are published together with Karimipour.
The relational network below visualizes the dependence. The scattered groups encircled in red are D’Orazio’s Italian collaborators. The big blue balls in the centre represent D’Orazio (right) closely cooperating with Karimipour (left) and his network.
D’Orazio could possibly have been a naive victim of a charming fraudster. Except that she also shows up on fraudulent papers that are not authored by Arash Karimipour. And guess what, one of these is even published in the EABE special issue:
A first look at her co-authors in red, S. Mohammad Sajadi and Mustafa Inc, does not instil much faith. The two have combined 45 PubPeer entries and we just met them on the Special Issue’s authorship-for-sale retraction note. The above D’Orazio paper is additionally part of an EABE ‘phenol/formaldehyde/…’ paper mill series that adds many more familiar names:
Submitted | Title | Authors |
23/10/2022 | Study of phenol removal from wastewater petroleum industry using molecular dy… | M. A. Albedah, Maha R. Hamoudi, Shayma Hamza Sadon, Elalaoui Oussama, Quynh Hoang Le |
31/10/2022 | Utilization of various waste sources in Saudi Arabia as a new clean and renew… | Ammar A. Melaibari, Ahmad S. Alamoudi, Mohamed E. Mostafa, Nidal H. Abu-Hamdeh |
15/11/2022 | Waste-to-Energy in Saudi Arabia: Treatment of petroleum wastewaters utilizing… | Ammar A. Melaibari, Ahmed S. Elamoudi, Mohamed E. Mostafa, Nidal H. Abu-Hamdeh |
24/12/2022 | Adsorptions of phenol molecules by graphene-based nanostructures, … | Hanaa Mohamed Said, Annunziata D’Orazio, S. Mohammad Sajadi, Mustafa Inc |
22/01/2023 | Removal of formaldehyde pollutant from petroleum industry wastewaters… | Mouna Ben Henda, Shayma Hamza Sadon, Zahra abdelmalek, Zhixiong Li, Quynh Hoang Le |
10/03/2023 | Investigating the use of polymers for eliminating the petroleum pollutants … | Chao Ma, Yuxi Lei, Weiyin Li, Xuefeng Xiao, Han Han |
In bold you can find Quynh Hoang Le (authorship-fraud retraction in SI), Zahra Abelmalek (same, plus a ghost) and Zhixiong Li (one authorship-fraud retraction with Arash, plus 3 more in the ‘Act II’ SI). No good company to be in.
The first four papers deal with the removal of phenol from petroleum wastewater, the last two with the removal of formaldehyde from petroleum wastewater. Finding such strongly themed submissions by unrelated authors is already interesting. On top of that, the abstracts of the four phenol papers are stunningly similar:
Compare the bottom two ‘According to the obtained results‘ sentences:
That is more than a bit odd for two papers that have no overlapping authors.
The citations also show many surprises. For example, the paper written by D’Orazio shares 2/3 of its citations (37 in total) with that of Study of phenol removal… by Albedah et al. One could hope that these references are extremely relevant to the topic. But alas:
Refs. [1-5] to the left were added by our Italian professor and should educate the reader on the global problems related to water. However, the citations include a textbook on organic chemistry, a review paper on boron chemistry, and a ‘q-rung orthopair’ fuzzy logic paper that Rhipidura albiventris would eat raw. And, big surprise, the Albedah paper shares these references: the two chemistry ones return as Refs. [1, 2] and are used to make a point about phenol, with the boron review paper out-of-context. The ‘q-rung orthopair’ paper becomes Ref. [40] where it is used to explain that “dichalcogenides are attractive monolayers in adsorption processes…” And this just continues: D’Orazio’s Refs. [6,7] ‘explaining’ water pollution become Refs. [38,39] in Albedah et al. to support the same dichalcogenides statement. It just seems as if someone sprinkled the same batch of citations through both papers for a science-y look.
These kind of citation overlaps can be found between all phenol papers. In fact, all four of them share a total of 21 citations and many of them are more than a bit far-fetched:
Examples of shared citations between all four phenol papersDate | Journal | Title |
2016.01 | Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A | Graphene and its nanostructure derivatives for use in bone tissue engineering: Recent advances |
2017.06 | Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A | Graphene as multifunctional delivery platform in cancer therapy |
2018.10 | Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A | Electroactive graphene oxide-incorporated collagen assisting vascularization for cardiac tissue engineering |
2020.06 | Chemsuschem | Product‐oriented Direct Cleavage of Chemical Linkages in Lignin |
2016.07 | Nature Reviews Nephrology | A wearable dialysis device: the first step to continuous therapy |
The first three shared citations address the use of graphene for respectively bone tissue engineering, drug delivery in cancer therapy, and in cardiac tissue engineering. The fourth paper is about turning biomass into useful chemicals, and the fifth and last example is a News & Views editorial that highlights a different paper presenting the results of a medical trial with a wearable dialysis system. These papers are in no way obvious citations for papers on phenol, petroleum wastewater, and molecular dynamics. And I do not believe it is coincidence that the dialysis editorial is cited by another five molecular dynamics papers, starting with this one that pretends to cure Parkinson’s.
The petroleum wastewaters series contains also two formaldehyde papers that share more than 70% of their citations (26 listed here). They can be linked to the phenol series by amongst others citations, with e.g. another dialysis paper being shared between all 6 petroleum wastewater papers. Also the below odd ‘aquatic creatures, birds, plants‘ sentence, first written by D’Orazio, is strangely repeated between papers:
The phenol/formaldehyde series appears to be written by a single person. Many of its putative authors are known from authorship-for-sale retractions. And I believe that D’Orazio will soon get the same recognition.
D’Orazio has published more questionable molecular dynamics papers separately from Arash. She is also author on a paper in a coronavirus ‘series’ that extends into the special issue:
Date | Title | Authors |
2023.12 | Investigating the effect of SiO2 nanoparticle addition and thickness of face-coverings on COVID-19 protection using m… | A.M. Hadian, Somaye Yaghoubi, Aliakbar Karimipour, Dao Viet Hang |
2021.09 | The investigation of energy management and atomic interaction between coronavirus structure in the vicinity of aqueous environment | Hui-Hui Guo , Mohd Yazid Bajuri , Hussam Alrabaiah , Taseer Muhammad , S. Mohammad Sajadi , Ferial Ghaemi , Dumitru Baleanu, Arash Karimipour |
2020.11 | Molecular dynamics performance for coronavirus simulation by C, N, O, and S atoms implementation dreiding force field… | Aliakbar Karimipour, Ali Amini, Mohammad Damghani Nouri, Annunziata D’Orazio, Roozbeh Sabetvand, Maboud Hekmatifar, Azam Marjani, Quang-Vu Bach |
2020.11 | Thermal and hydrodynamic properties of coronavirus at various temperature and pressure via molecular dynamics approach | Omid Malekahmadi, Akbar Zarei, Mohammad Behzad Botlani Esfahani, Maboud Hekmatifar, Roozbeh Sabetvand, Azam Marjani, Quang‐Vu Bach |
D’Orazio is author of the third paper (2020), together with Aliakbar Karimipour. For narrative purposes we now allow Aliakbar to come into corporeal existence and we shall briefly pretend him to be different from Arash, who happens to be author on the second paper. Other notable co-authors include Quang-Vu-Bach (authorship fraud retraction), and Roozbeh Savetvand and Maboud Hekfatimar. The latter two share a retraction and an editorial expression of concern for authorship fraud on two molecular dynamics papers. Fun fact: the EoC paper is authored by Sechenov dentist Pavel Kamenskov, who must be a colleague of our Sechenov dentist and renaissance woman Svetlana Danshina, whom you met in Part I. The papermilling mathematician Dumitru Baleanu of the 2nd paper also deserves mention: 2024-02 he received his very own For Better Science article, by Smut Clyde:
A Critique of Pure Reason
“the rarest, most sought-after token of recognition is when the Chen brothers steal your identity to use as a fictive co-author on one of their plagiarism gallimaufreys. For instance, “Bunnitru Daleanu” was based on (and memorialises) the nonpareil Rumanian mathematician Dumitru Baleanu – now resident in Turkey” – Smut Clyde
The two 2020 papers were submitted within 2 weeks of each other. The first 2020 paper purports to show that an (undefined) coronavirus falls apart in warm water. And the D’Orazio’s paper claims that that happens even faster when the virus is contact with a stainless steel surface. Except that it is all make-believe molecular dynamics:
The animation on the left compares MD snapshots published in the two papers, after correcting for mirroring… And what we see is familiar: the red water molecules in both papers sit at the exact same position whilst ‘behind’ them a virus or blue blob shifts up- and down. The D’Orazio’s paper needed a surface, and just like in other production it is Photoshopped in. And way too low, leaving a significant white gap to the ‘water’. In Fig. 5 of D’Orazio’s paper one can see that gap even changes size between frames (right panel). Also note that whilst the ‘virus’ moves, the water molecules at the edges remain stationary. And there is much more wrong.
The 2021 corona paper featuring Arash Karimipour contributes cartloads of citations to selected authors and makes the shocking discovery that a corona virus is actually highly unstable in plain, cold water. Finally, the 2023 EABE special issue coronavirus paper re-uses the same ‘virus’ blob and the same fraud:
To finish this section, a final D’Orazio paper, co-authored with retraction-branded authorship-frauds S. Mohammad Sajadi [1] and Zhixiong Li [1, 2, 3, 4]:
No Arash nor Aliakbar Karimipour can be found. But we still have the usual low-level MD fraud:
According to the text the water is flowing through a channel, dragging along the green particles. Except that the water molecules mostly rotate in place whilst the particles ‘teleport’ around.
I would judge that D’Orazio is perfectly capable of finding her own papermill products and buying her own authorship seats.
Siamak Hoseinzadeh
Bad science behaves like an infection. Once it takes hold in a university, it spreads. Meet Dr. Siamak Hoseinzadeh, research fellow in the Department of Planning, Design and Technology of Architecture at Sapienza. Siamak is a proud BE-FOR-ERC grand holder, part of “an initiative fielded by Sapienza University to attract the best and most promising researchers“. He is also author of not-so-promising papers in the EABE special issue.
Hoseinzadeh’s work is mostly focused on energy generation, transport, and storage. His oeuvre contains a single molecular dynamics paper that is published in… the molecular dynamics-themed EABE special issue:
And, surprise, also the other three authors lack any molecular dynamics experience.
Reading the paper one will find a non-existing term: interpolator-filament interactions. A simple Google search brings up a single paper in which that same term is also used: Insights into the morphology and gas separation characteristics of methylene diisocyanate (MDI)-functionalized nanoTiO2 polyurethane: quantum mechanics and molecular simulations studies. There are no authors or affiliations are shared.
Apart from the non-existing interpolator term the papers also share an upper bond/upper bound typo (yellow highlight in the figure captions above) and a plainly wrong equation (red crosses). On top of this they share 38 citations, figure layouts, caption texts, CH4/CO2/N2 molecules, …:
It is easy to guess who is the real author of Hoseinzadeh’s special issue paper: Iman Salahshoori. Salahshoori is first author of the “Insights into the morphology…” paper and receives ‘just’ 12 citations from this self-signed product. The Special Issue paper, however, gifts him 15 citations whilst many of his co-authors drop out:
Apart from the obvious authorship fraud, also the usual citation fraud found its way into the paper. Our Arash Karimipour is the number two citation recipient, nanofluid mega-cheater Ali J. Chamkha number three. And most of their citations come from a single sentence that hands out 61(!!!) citations to any field the authors’ desire:
This Hoseinzadeh paper has absolutely nothing to do with “best and most promising researchers“.
Bottom of the barrel: Nanofluids & Chamkha
“Did you know that Chamkha is “Ranked in the World’s Top 0.02267% Scientist”? Or that he “Completed all degrees in a record time of five years”?” – Maarten van Kampen
Then, Hoseinzadeh embraced the opportunity for special issue scamming by publishing a second paper:
The topic of this paper is much closer to his presumed expertise: the optimization of a renewable energy system. Except that neither Hoseinzadeh nor his co-authors have ever written a paper using the lattice Boltzmann method2.
The authors obviously added the lattice Boltzmann bit to get their seat in the special issue. The abstract promises that a fancy “machine learning assisted lattice Boltzmann” method will find “The best specifications of PCM, including type and thickness“. Except that the type is never revealed and that the optimum thickness of 42 6.92 cm is absolutely useless without knowing what the authors are actually simulating. There is a two page long Section 2.2 “The employed lattice Boltzmann method” that could have given the answer. But it is just an equation-filled smoke screen that adds more questions than answers. At some point even the authors got bored and simply stop the ruse with, quote: “not getting the text lengthy“.
For good measures first author Ali Sohani throws in two out-of-context citations to himself. The paper also has a Section 2.3 on machine learning that can be summarized as “We tried multiple networks and selected the best one“. And no, it is not revealed what network works best, what data went into it, or what data came out. It is all so stupid, it should never, ever, ever have passed peer review. But then again, also this SI paper got published whilst it is really impossible to use molecular dynamics for… image analysis.
Apart from being incomplete, the paper is also outright fraudulent. And not only this paper, a whole series of papers first-authored by Ali Sohani. The full story starts with a MSc thesis on the design of four geothermal and solar energy systems by an unrelated student, Mert Temiz. Each of these designs is spun out into a paper, with ‘multigeneration system 2‘ turning into the paper Concentrated solar driven thermochemical hydrogen production plant with thermal energy storage and geothermal systems:
Whilst turning the thesis chapter into a paper Temiz made a copy-paste error. In Table A1 (top-right, red numbers) he forgot to replace the 11.6 kg/s geothermal water flow of previous ‘multigeneration system 1‘ by the 310 kg/s water flow for system 2 (bottom-left, yellow numbers).
Then our Ali Sohani comes along. He takes the Concentrated solar driven.. paper from Temiz and pretends to better optimize it in three other papers, with the last one being the Hoseinzadeh-authored EABE piece:
Date | Title | Authors |
2022.09 | Dynamic multi-objective optimization applied to a solar-geothermal multi-generation system for hydrogen production, desalination, and energy storage | Ali Sohani, Fatemeh Delfani, Mohammadmehdi Hosseini, Hoseyn Sayyaadi, Nader Karimi , Larry K.B. Li , Mohammad Hossein Doranehgard |
2022.05 | Price inflation effects on a solar-geothermal system for combined production of hydrogen, power, freshwater and heat | Ali Sohani , Fatemeh Delfani , Mohammadmehdi Hosseini, Hoseyn Sayyaadi , Nader Karimi , Larry K.B. Li , Mohammad Hossein Doranehgard |
2023.07 | Optimal techno-economic and thermo-electrical design for a phase change material enhanced renewable energy driven polygeneration… | Ali Sohani, Mohsen Dehbashi, Fatemeh Delfani, Siamak Hoseinzadeh |
I was delighted to see Nader Karimi in the author list, the special and regular editor of EABE that had to ‘step down’. And Mohammad Doranehgard, who has a retraction for a plagiarized paper featuring a made-up co-author. In images the original and three derived papers look like this:
In the first spin-off (top-right) Sohani takes Temiz’ system and artwork (with citation) and purports to find a better working point by doing an important-sounding dynamic multi-objective optimization of three parameters that include the geothermal flow. And would you be surprised that that flow is not 310 kg/s, but close to the misreported 11.6 kg/s:
This is a truly amazing result: Sohani’s three optimized values are all within ±10% of those reported in the original Temiz paper, even reproducing the copy-paste mistake that caused the reported value to be a factor 30 off…
Sohani submits his next paper Price inflation effects on a solar-geothermal system… just two weeks later. In that time he added an inflation correction and made his own equivalent diagram of the system. The results are still very familiar, with an optimum geothermal water flow starting at 10.5 kg/s and an optimum solar area between 20,000 and 23,000 m2. Again the typo is nicely reproduced:
The final paper in the series we already met. Karimipour’s special issue came along and provided a welcome opportunity to inflate one’s bibliometrics. Getting a seat required a slight tweak to the system: the ‘parabolic through collector’ in the top right needed to be replaced by a ‘solar power generation system’ that now also includes solar panels. This to fit the lattice Boltzmann topic of the special issue: solar panels can be cooled by phase change materials that can be optimized using the machine learning and lattice Boltzmann ruse:
The special issue paper is completely devoid of any meaning: it is not only left unspecified what was optimized, even what came out of the optimization is not shown. Just that things get 10% better after optimization. So depending on one’s choice, either nothing is wrong because there is nothing that can be wrong. Or the paper is totally bollocks.
Hoseinzadeh not only buys authorship for papers in the Special Issue, he also treats himself on a shower of ill-deserved citations. In the more boring cases these come in the form of “Last block” citations discussed in part I (here and here), or just out-of-context citations as can be seen here. I also found a more creative way. Hoseinzadeh has not written any papers on molecular dynamics, so it is hard to cite him from a MD paper. But two papers (perovskite- and combustion mill…) have their introduction suddenly veer off in a completely irrelevant direction, allowing them to cite Hoseinzadeh. Like, discuss and cite his works six times in a row:
In summer 2023, Hoseinzadeh became editorial board member of two other Elsevier journals: Unconventional Resources and South African Journal of Chemical Engineering. I do not believe it to be coincidence that in January 2024 the papermill mega-fraudster Iskander Tlili published his very first paper in that latter journal.
Ali Golmohammadzadeh
This is a honorary mention, as Ali Golmohammadzadeh did not publish in the EABE special issue. Thus far he just made it to a single-line mention on For Better Science, but he deserves much more. Golmohammadzadeh is an alumnus of Sapienza, having obtained a PhD in its Performing Arts department with a thesis titled Visual Music: Interrelation of Visual Components and Sound.
Wiley: Committed to integrity? Get out!
“We have initiated post-acceptance peer review with independent reviewers… ” – Wiley.
Ali deserves a place here because he shows that not only Russian dentists, but also Iranian performing arts students can do molecular dynamics: he is author on nine papers in which he shows off his MD and nano-fluidics knowledge! It is no surprise that we already met many of his co-authors on these papers. And certainly no surprise that the ghostly Aliakbar Karimipour is among them:
It does not seem beneficial to inflate one’s CV with molecular dynamics papers when one is studying performing arts. My best guess is that our Ali sold his European affiliation at Sapienza, with his co-authors hoping that this increases acceptance rates. So Ali is possibly something like an affiliation mule, dragging in a respectable (?) affiliation.
CODA by LS: Pippo Berto
Since Maarten gathered you all here to listen to the papermill cazzeggio at the Sapienza University of Rome, allow me to recycle some Friday Shorts material and introduce another great Sapienza papermiller, Professor Filippo Berto.
According to his institutional profile, Pippo is a “Renowned Chair of Mechanics of Materials”, “editor-in-chief or Editor of several scientific journals” and “vice-president of the European Society of Structural Integrity”. Among other things. The man is merely 46 years old, and he already now published over 1200 papers. Some of these papers are discussed on PubPeer, some got retracted already.
This is Pippo’s secret to success. Number 1: double-publishing!
Filippo Berto, Paolo Lazzarin The volume-based Strain Energy Density approach applied to static and fatigue strength assessments of notched and welded structures Procedia Engineering (2009) doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2009.06.036
Secret Number 2: the Iranians! Here is Berto and the Iranian papermill fraudster Davood Toghraie:
Vahid Monfared , Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad , Mahmood Razzaghi , D. Toghraie , Maboud Hekmatifar , Filippo Berto A Review Study for Creep in Different Nanocomposites Metals and Materials International (2023) doi: 10.1007/s12540-023-01405-x
According to Sameer et al, the grass is green, the sky is blue, and magnesium alloys in car wheels are the only solution to reduce CO2 emissions.
Sometimes Berto’s own papers with Iranians get cited by infamous papermill fraudsters like Ali Fakhri (examples here and here). But here is another paper by Berto with the Iranians:
Ali Izadi Ghahferokhi , Masoud Kasiri-Asgarani , Reza Ebrahimi-kahrizsangi , Mahdi Rafiei , Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad, Kamran Amini , Filippo Berto Effect of bonding temperature and bonding time on microstructure of dissimilar transient liquid phase bonding of GTD111/BNi-2/IN718 system Journal of Materials Research and Technology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.jmrt.2022.10.014
Alexander Magazinov also noted that “A number of references that boost the citation statistics of a certain HM Ali are out-of-context and therefore unwarranted”, and he contacted Berto with this criticism. In March 2023, Berto replied:
It was this Reviewer Report, which basically consisted only of this request:
- “https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13369-022-06832-3
- Energy 246, 123441 [doi: 10.1016/j.energy.2022.123441]
- https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-12-2021-0782
- DOI: 10.2174/1389201023666220411114620
- Frontiers in Energy Research 10, 866466” [doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2022.866466]
All by Hafiz Muhammad Ali. Guess what author name stands in the metadata of the Word file. Yep: “Hafiz Ali”.
Berto with even more Iranians:
Mohammad Taher Amirzade-Iranaq , Mahdi Omidi, Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad , Abbas Saberi , Somayeh Abazari , Nadia Teymouri , Farid Naeimi , Claudia Sergi , Ahmad Fauzi Ismail , Safian Sharif , Filippo Berto MWCNTs-TiO2 Incorporated-Mg Composites to Improve the Mechanical, Corrosion and Biological Characteristics for Use in Biomedical Fields Materials (2023) doi: 10.3390/ma16051919
Secret Number 3: The Chinese! Here is Berto with co-authors from Iran and China. His own affiliation is as “Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway“, because this is where Pippo used to work before coming to Sapienza.
Sina Abbaszadeh Hashemi , Khalil Farhangdoost , Wenchen Ma , Danial Ghahremani Moghadam , Reza Masoudi Nejad , Filippo Berto Effects of tensile overload on fatigue crack growth in AM60 magnesium alloys Theoretical and Applied Fracture Mechanics (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.tafmec.2022.103573
“References 11, 12, 15, 17 and 18 are to the benefit of A. Yan and are about electrical components, not fracture mechanics.“
Nick Wise: “On the 27th of July 2022 an advert was placed on a Telegram offering citations in an academic paper. This article is the only one that matches the keywords in the advert according to Web of Science. The advert was placed after the paper had been submitted and presumably after it had been accepted subject to minor revision.“
Again, Berto with Iranians and Chinese:
Farnoosh Pahlevanzadeh , Mohsen Setayeshmehr , Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad , Rahmatollah Emadi , Mahshid Kharaziha , S. Ali Poursamar , Ahmad Fauzi Ismail , Safian Sharif , Xiongbiao Chen , Filippo Berto A Review on Antibacterial Biomaterials in Biomedical Applications: From Materials Perspective to Bioinks Design Polymers (2022) doi: 10.3390/polym14112238
Berto explain that is was a review article and the cited figure was from reference 135 (Shi et al 2019) and not his. In any case, he wasn’t even bothered that the copyright on this image lies with Elsevier and he never obtained a permission.
This was retracted recently, for plagiarism:
Reza Masoudi Nejad, Zhiliang Liu, Wenchen Ma , Filippo Berto Reliability analysis of fatigue crack growth for rail steel under variable amplitude service loading conditions and wear International Journal of Fatigue (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.ijfatigue.2021.106450
But of course it was not just self-plagiarism, but proper plagiarism, from Huang et al 2013. Moreover, it contained a whole block of nonsense references to paying papermilling fraudsters and Berto’s coauthors from Iran, China and russia -Bokov, Davarpanah, Torghaie, Fakhri etc.
Which brings us to Secret Number 4: russians! Here is Berto with a whole bunch of them:
Sergey V. Panin , Dmitry G. Buslovich , Yuri V. Dontsov , Svetlana A. Bochkareva , Lyudmila A. Kornienko , Filippo Berto UHMWPE-Based Glass-Fiber Composites Fabricated by FDM. Multiscaling Aspects of Design, Manufacturing and Performance Materials (2021) doi: 10.3390/ma14061515
The first author “Sergey Panin on behalf of all the authors” claimed on PubPeer the recycled photo is merely “similar”, and anyway, their earlier paper was cited somewhere.
Here is Berto, unperturbed by the genocidal war in Ukraine, with his dear friend Panin and even more russians, publishing questionable spectra:
Natalia Narkevich , Ilya Vlasov , Mikhail Volochaev , Yulia Gomorova , Yury Mironov , Sergey Panin , Filippo Berto , Pavel Maksimov , Evgeny Deryugin Low-Temperature Deformation and Fracture of Cr-Mn-N Stainless Steel: Tensile and Impact Bending Tests Metals (2023) doi: 10.3390/met13010095
Much of Berto’s publication output is co-authored with “colleagues” in russia, Iran and China. In an email, Berto informed me (typos his):
He also told me:
Uh-Uh. Berto remained silent when I asked if his legal threat was directed at me.
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All 3 of the 3 articles were really successful. It is a great job to gather so much information from just a single journal and its issues. However, the situation at the end of the 3 articles was a bit frustrating for me. In the comments of the first article I gave the example of another group we came across; it was a papermill and citation cartel organization between Denmark, Iran, Canada, and Sweden. Our main reference for this was the Arjmand article on this website. I thought we were doing something important, but what you have presented here shows that this is really a very common method. Yes, there are many similar organizations, especially in China, Russia and India, but most of them are doing it from their own countries. Iranian researchers use European/Western funds to do this kind of work. It’s really frustrating to see this because the country changes (e.g. Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, etc.), the name of the Iranian researchers changes, and the research subject changes, but the method is absolutely similar. How long can we go on like this?
I would like to ask a few questions because if you know, it might be useful for our work as well;
1) Have you contacted D’Orazio or her department? Did she give any response? This is important for me because we also want to share what we have with Danish, Swedish and Canadian institutions so that this and similar scams can be prevented, but we don’t know whether we should contact the heads of the university departments or other institutions. That is why I am asking. As far as I understand from the article “Hier Kommt Herr Sonne (https://forbetterscience.com/2024/02/07/hier-kommt-herr-sonne/) on this website, it is useless to report such situations to the Scandinavian universities. So where can we report it? If we don’t report it somewhere, it will only end with what we find and write and the comments we mentioned on Pubpeer.
2) “Bibliographic data from Dimensions for Annunziata D’Orazio.” I like this graphics very much, but I can’t create such graphics in Dimensions. Such graphics would be very useful to better identify the connections between the names and institutions (between Denmark, Sweden, Canada, and Iran – and the Netherlands, Greece, and Cyprus is on the new route-) we have obtained, but I think Dimensions requires a paid subscription for this. Or is there a way that I don’t know about? Were you able to create these charts with a paid subscription?
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I forgot to mention; Mert Temiz is a PhD student at the university in Canada where Ibrahim Dincer is a professor ( https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=sBmfr2oAAAAJ&hl=en ). Isn’t that an impressive record for a PhD student? It is very similar to Nabat’s situation at DTU and Razmi’s situation in Alberta, which I gave as examples in the comments of the first article. All of them are still PhD students!
Temiz received 205 citations in 2023 (source: Google Scholar). We are in the 4th month of 2024 and the number of citations is already 115. Really impressive!!!!
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Well I called for more Red Dwarf references so top marks for the cover picture. From Series 1, the “Future Echoes” episode I think but I’m not 100% sure? All power to the nerds.
But statements like “Here is Berto, unperturbed by the genocidal war in Ukraine, with his dear friend Panin and even more russians,” just harm your own cause. I don’t know the authors, don’t work in that field, haven’t even worked with a Russian (ex-)national in decades, but insinuating that someone is in the wrong for working with people because they’re from a particular country is just plain wrong. The papers are supposedly featured on this site because of serious problems with their authenticity, integrity, evidence of clear fraud, bullying etc, or are now papers going to be rated on which nationalities are involved? I support Ukraine’s war against Putin and Russia too, but I’m not going to judge the quality of a paper based on the nationalities of the co-authors.
What’s the definition of prejudice? Is this website focusing on “For Better Science” or on “For Politically Approved Science Based on Individual Opinions”? The two are not compatible.
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Ah yes, the view from the cushy West, where you never experienced totalitarianism and just assume that science, culture and sports are everywhere free and totally outside of politics.
Now, let me give you some facts about russia.
1. Scientists who opposed the regime and its war on Ukraine were sacked or jailed
2. Scientists who never openly opposed the regime but collaborated with western colleagues were sacked or jailed, too. Yes, I know someone who was sacked.
What remains in russian universities are Z-rascists, Mitläufer (conformists and opportunists) and possibly a few decent but very quiet people. I presume you referred to the latter to denounce my russophobia. Well, those few remaining decent people in russian universities will never dare to start any collaborations with westerners because point 2.
Which is exactly why I called to boycott russian science.
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“Ah yes, the view from the cushy West, where you never experienced totalitarianism and just assume that science, culture and sports are everywhere free and totally outside of politics.”
Don’t make naive assumptions about what people may or may not know, let alone what they assume. Your viewpoint seems to be that if someone doesn’t just condemn all Russian scientists as racists or opportunists then they are naive? If it is then that’s not only braindead stupid but it’s simply prejudice. What makes you think that everyone in the West is unaware of totalitarianism and it’s methods?
As I said before, this is where you harm your own cause. If papers and their authors deserve to be criticised because of fraud etc then criticise them for that. But mingling that with wild claims that someone is somehow guilty because of their nationality (or to extend the principle; their race, religion, gender, lifestyle etc) then that is wrong.
So is this website “For Politically Approved Science Based on Individual Opinions”?
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Can we maybe just fight scientific fraud here? That in itself is already a formidable task. Maybe only surpassed by restraining Leonid :-).
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We are fighting scientific fraud. But some people call us racists for pointing out where the papermills are: China, Iran, russia etc. And what fraudsters these regimes send out to work as scientists here.
Because sad fact is: western universities are not interested in honest researchers from those countries. Either they are not allowed out, or their publication records and recommendation letters are crap.
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Yes, this has also caught my attention. When they collaborate with people of their own nation in falsifying/scamming scientific journals, papers and citations, they are not racist (we see the Iranian network in this article) but those who bring this up are accused of racism. This is a really interesting situation. Shouldn’t we also say something about those who use the values of global, diverse and inclusive academia to gain academic positions and then abandon these values and engage in academic dishonesty by favoring only people from their own nation?
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The reason why some PIs employ mostly lab members of their own nationality is that they can threaten and blackmail them more easily.
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Do you think Baniahmad has capabilities to blackmail Taheri?
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Of course not. He will blackmail other Iranian students.
I meant to say that by far not all compatriots of the PI are employed for the purpose of promotion and career advancement. Sorry for not being clear.
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Never mind, what I wrote was a lame attempt to make a joke 😉
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“The reason why some PIs employ mostly lab members of their own nationality is that they can threaten and blackmail them more easily.”
Yes. I think it’s so taken for granted that people see it as a normal and understandable. If they only want to work with people from their own country, why don’t they work in their own countries? It’s obvious because those countries are corrupt from top to bottom. So they come from those countries to universities that have money and emphasize inclusiveness. And then they continue with the same corrupt mentality. They only hire people from their own ethnicity. I don’t want to compare people with viruses, but the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had a similar method. At least vaccines have been developed. When will there be a vaccine for the current problem in academia?
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Leonid’s general answer is absolutely correct.
But then again, there is the particular affiliation, “School of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, 634030 Tomsk, Russia.” And it’s a very fitting place for The Karimipour Saga.
Let me just mention two adjacent names. Mikhail A. Sheremet (“The best scientist of Russia. A mathematician from Tomsk entered the list of the most-cited scientists in the world.”) And Francis Verpoort (“A TPU scientist from Belgium wants to become a Russian citizen.”)
The thing is: for the academics from the cushy West, these are highly capable and prolific researchers, at least while they are not exposed at FBS or elsewhere. Because an academic from the cushy West has it as an imperative to shove their own bullshit detector where light may not pass.
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No, it really isn’t. You are supporting statements that someone is somehow guilty because of their nationality. That is racism, whether you are in the “cushy West” or the, presumably, ‘harsh and tough East’. Or however you characterise your geopolitical view of the world.
I’m increasingly bemused by this opinion that academics in the West are unaware of the world’s harsh realities. Do non-Western academics live in ivory towers with no understanding of the world around them? Presumably not and so if not, why do you assume that the Western academics do? I think you may be a little insular in your own thinking. For a start, why not first ask what someone else thinks rather than blindly assuming?
As an example, what’s the FBS? Do you mean the FSB? If so, you might want to stop for a minute to consider that just maybe some in the “cushy West” do know a few things about life in Russia, past and present.
“Because an academic from the cushy West has it as an imperative to shove their own bullshit detector where light may not pass.”
Whether that chip on your shoulder relates to the “cushy West”, Putin’s Russia or something else entirely you’ll need to explain that sentence more coherently before I can reply. AS IT MAKES NO SENSE!!
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Careful Ewan, this is my site and not your office. I can kick you out just as you would do to a student who accuses you of racism willy-nilly. And since I am not your student, you can shove your assessment of me as “braindead stupid” right up your arse.
In general, I learned from Twitter that racism is a popular accusation in academia to throw around where no other argument sticks.
And indeed, unlike me, a Ukrainian Jew, you as Australian male of white Nordic race are the true expert on racism. Nobody suffered more of racism than your kind. Except maybe the russians, another white master race busy with a genocide right now.
I don’t have to explain anything to you in your ivory tower, Ewan. Everyone else got my point, except you. And you better retract this racism accusations against me or you can go commenting elsewhere, but not here.
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Ewan Blanch replied again, accusing me of racism, this time against his White Aryan race. Seriously.
He also complained that he is not allowed to own this comment section and started blathering about lawsuits.
I deleted that comment, he is banned now.
I pity his students.
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I just understood that WASPy Ewan accused us both of racism against russians. You are racist against yourself, Alex. The worst kind! And he confused FBS (For Better Science) with FSB , haha.
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I work with plenty of good Russian scientists. After Russia invaded the Ukrain some of them left their country. Others stayed behind. I imagine that they are still good scientists. Both in what they do and in how they think about the whole situations. At the very least they are not worse than every other person remaining and working in Russia.
There is of course some ‘frog in boiling water’ issue. Russia is moving step by step in the direction of a super creepy totalitarian and militarized state. When should smart people jump from that pot with hot water? At the same time: when should any of us seeing what is going on do something apart from what we were doing the years before?
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An earlier Expression of Concern for Berto has finally been upgraded to retraction.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engfailanal.2021.105457
https://pubpeer.com/publications/196F5E84F5104AF5B15DE5CA0D22C6
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it seems researchers from S*hole countries just want to use papers as a way to get out! They approach desperate western researchers who can’t publish on their own/nor have novelty/nor some who can prove that they are right, to publish together. Mutually beneficial (non) biding agreement for both. However, bad for the scientific community. The same seems to be the case for Leonid and Matrin beloved old German researcher at Stanford 😉
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