Nick Wise wrote about some bottom-feeding papermillers and their bottom-feeding Iraqi papermill which sells plagiarised papers. The customers are not only Iraqis and other Arabs, but also Poles, Hungarians, and russians, the authorships are sold on Telegram and WhatsApp. The extra bit of irony: those from whom the cheap Iraqi papermill steals, may have obtained their papers from a higher quality Iranian papermill.

Nick’s article contains additional text provided by me.

Incidentally, the main protagonist of the story, the Iraqi papermill fraudster Qusay Hassan, wrote to me just before this very article was published, to complain about reader comments from May 2024:

“I am writing to urgently request the removal of a comment posted on your platform that targets me and my co-authors in a defamatory and unfounded manner. […] it does not adhere to the principles of fair and evidence-based academic discussion. It is important to maintain the integrity of your platform and ensure that it is not used as a tool for personal vendettas or defamation.”

I think the word “vendetta” must be copyrighted as an exclusively academic term. The other protagonist of this story and Hassan’s coauthor and PhD mentor, the Polish professor Marek Jaszczur, did not reply when asked to comment.

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Anyone can start a papermill!

By Nick Wise (and LS)

In June 2024, Sasan Sadrizadeh, professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in Sweden, posted on LinkedIn about a paper that had recently been published and then retracted in Elsevier’s Energy & Buildings:

Qusay Hassan, Nadia Sarhan , Emad Mahrous Awwad , Tariq J. Al-Musawi , Nouby M. Ghazaly , Patrik Viktor, Monika Fodor, Amjad Iqbal , Sergey Zhiltsov , Azamat Makhmudov , Ali Khudhair Al-Jiboory , Ihssan Alrekabi , Sameer Algburi , Marek Jaszczur , Aws Zuhair Sameen , Maha Barakat Optimizing smart building energy systems for sustainable living: A realistic approach to enhance renewable energy consumfaption [sic] and reduce emissions in residential buildings Energy and Buildings (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2024.114354 

The purpose of the post was not to laugh at the spelling in the title, but to point out the blatant plagiarism of his own article Behzadi et al 2023, published 10 months earlier in the Elsevier journal Energy Conversion and Management.

As reported by Retraction Watch, the paper was quickly withdrawn¹ by Elsevier for ‘possible duplicates/manipulations in Figures 2, 5, 6, 11, 15, and 16’. This story was picked up by For Better Science in July 2024 Shorts.

In brief, Sadrizadeh’s victimized PhD student Amirmohammad Behzadi is quite likely a papermiller, with an h-index of 26 and almost 2400 citations, more than his PhD mentor Sadrizadeh. So far, Behzadi’s papers were flagged “only” for inappropriate citations to his own and his dodgy coauthors’ papers, outside of all scientific context. Sadrizadeh has a PubPeer record also. Also, one of his and Behzadi’s coauthors is a certain Pouria Ahmadi, who was seen papermilling with Ibrahim Dincer, read about the latter here:

Here a paper by Sadrizadeh, Ahmadi and Behzadi:

Seyed Mojtaba Alirahmi , Amirmohammad Behzadi , Pouria Ahmadi , Sasan Sadrizadeh An innovative four-objective dragonfly-inspired optimization algorithm for an efficient, green, and cost-effective waste heat recovery from SOFC Energy (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.energy.2022.125607 

Why does one cite a paper by Behzadi and Ahmadi to reference the first law of thermodynamics? Especially when that paper was coauthored by the toxic papermiller Somchai Wongwises? Other citations to Behzadi and his associates are similarly inappropriate.

A regular coauthor and fellow citation farmer of Behzadi and Ahmadi is a certain Ahmad Arabkoohsar, who is another papermiller, seen publishing with the known fraudsters Wongwises, Mikhail Sheremet and Omid Mahian (read August 2024 Shorts), plus with Mohsen Sheikholeslami and Zhixiong Li.

Sadrizadeh defended Behzadi’s activities in a later article on Retraction Watch by insisting that self-citations are “not only common but also often necessary to demonstrate the continuity and development of their research“.

The Thieves

Let’s return to the theft of Behzadi’s paper, whatever its original quality may have been.

In his LinkedIn post, Sadrizadeh noted that the paper had sixteen authors from six different countries, namely Iraq, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Uzbekistan and Russia. How did all these authors meet and decide to collaborate?

The first author is Qusay Hassan of Diyala University in Iraq, whose deleted Research Gate profile is archived here. According to his profile, until October 2023 he was “Professor (Associate)” at the University of Stuttgart in Germany – clearly a lie. More closer to the truth is Hassan’s stated affiliation from 2015 to 2023 at AGH University in Kraków, Poland, in the lab of Marek Jaszczur, who happens to be the fourteenth author of the withdrawn paper (and vice-dean for education at his Faculty of Energy and Fuels). A comment by Marek Wroński under the Retraction Watch article suggests that Hassan completed his PhD with Jaszcur.

The withdrawn article above is not Hassan’s only paper with problems. The following paper was retracted on the 25^th of July after being reported to the journal for irrelevant references:

Qusay Hassan, Ali Khudhair Al-Jiboory , Muna Al-Razgan , Patrik Viktor , Nouby M. Ghazaly , Emad Mahrous Awwad , Sameer Algburi , Bashar Mahmood Ali , I.B. Sapaev , Imad Ibrahim Dawood , Marek Jaszczur , Aws Zuhair Sameen , Maha Barakat Sustainable energy planning and integration for district heating systems: A case study in Nineveh Province, Iraq Journal of Building Engineering (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.jobe.2024.109411 

As noted on PubPeer, the authors needed to provide supporting data for their “comparative” [sic] of different regions. Their method was to type Nineveh into Google Scholar and pick three articles, with no concern for whether they contained relevant data.

When the publisher investigated, they found more problems. The retraction notice from 25 July 2024 states:

‘Following identification of apparently unrelated citations, an investigation of this paper identified eight (8) authors added following initial review during the revision process. Contrary to journal policy, this was done without requesting or receiving permission from the editor. This is a form of authorship manipulation.

The 8 added authors were: Ali Khudhair Al-Jiboory, Muna Al-Razgan, Patrik Viktor, Nouby M. Ghazaly, Emad Mahrous Awwad, Bashar Mahmood Ali, I.B. Sapaev, Imad Ibrahim Dawood.

Additionally, a number of unrelated citations, including reference numbers 44, 45, 46, 62, 63, 66, 67 and 68 were identified. The corresponding author claims that these citations are correct although none provide support for the paper content in the context in which they were cited. This is an apparent instance of citation manipulation.

The corresponding author maintains that the authorship and citation are correct.’

The corresponding author with interesting standards for authorship and citation is Qusay Hassan. The other authors who were not added at revision stage are Sameer Algburi, Marek Jaszczur, Aws Zuhair Sameen and Maha Barakat.

That this is still possible in 2024 is ludicrous. A paper can be submitted with five authors and they can decide to add eight more during the revision stage and there is nothing to stop them. The editor is supposed to be asked for permission, but nothing in the system ensures that happens and the editor receives no notification that the author count has more than doubled. Of course some people will always try to commit publication fraud, but Elsevier doesn’t have to make it this easy! Anyway, I digress.

As with references 44-46, references 62 and 63 appear to have been used because ‘machine learning’ featured in the title, with no concern for whether the content was in any way relevant. However, 66-68 are different.

These references are again irrelevant but are all from the same journal, the Al-Kitab Journal For Pure Sciences, a journal run by Al-Kitab University in Iraq. Who is the managing editor of the journal? Sameer Algburi, author of both retracted papers. In fact, the same three references are also present in the first retracted paper as well, suggesting that Algburi is systematically including the papers in his publications to boost the citations count of his journal and have it indexed beyond ‘crossref/doi’ and ‘Iraqi academic scientific journals’.

The plagiarism, authorship manipulation and citation farming in the papers above are all hallmarks of a papermill. Let’s check it out.

The Papermill

On the 20th of December, 2023, a channel called High–Q was created on Telegram by a user called @theprofExp. The channel promised:

“High Quality Research Papers (ISI, SCOPUS, SCI, JCR).
1) Co-authors participation.
2) Rapid publication.
3) Payment after acceptance.“

The same day, two adverts for authorship were published.

All the information a potential customer could want is there: journal, title, status, and most importantly prices. The journals advertised are top-tier, Q1 or Q2, in major publishers, whilst the reference numbers, Q-20 and Q-017, suggest that these adverts aren’t quite the beginning of the scheme.

Neither paper has been published under the titles in those posts, however in January there was a follow-up post saying that the paper Q-017 was accepted.

The post includes a link provided to the authors to track their article, which can be found here, with a slightly different title.

Qusay Hassan, Patrik Viktor, Tariq J. Al-Musawi , Bashar Mahmood Ali , Sameer Algburi , Haitham M. Alzoubi , Ali Khudhair Al-Jiboory , Aws Zuhair Sameen , Hayder M. Salman , Marek Jaszczur The renewable energy role in the global energy Transformations Renewable Energy Focus (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.ref.2024.100545 

Once again we see that Qusay Hassan is the first author, along with many names that are already familiar: Algburi, Al-Jiboory, Jaszczur and others. The paper is not yet retracted but, as has been noted on PubPeer, it plagiarises heavily from Gielen et al 2019, “The role of renewable energy in the global energy transformation“, with the concept and figures copied almost without alteration.

High–Q continued to post and repost adverts on the channel throughout January and February, then on the 26th pointed to a new Telegram channel, AQ-Papers. That channel continued to post adverts for authorships every few days until June, when at least one journal started investigating one of their papers. The entire channel is now deleted, however archived posts from both channels can be found here and here. There was also a WhatsApp group for posting the adverts, a full transcript of which can be found here.

In total across all the adverts there were 24 unique paper IDs (Q-017 etc), which match 13 published papers for a success rate of 54%. All of the adverts were for papers related to energy, mainly renewable energy and the energy transition, except one, which was for a paper on nanofluids². The intended journals for the papers were predominantly in Elsevier journals, with a few for MDPI and De Gruyter and one each for Springer, Taylor & Francis and Sage. I don’t know if the papermillers preferred Elsevier because there were many journals that matched their favourite topics, or because they knew of a particular weakness in Elsevier’s submission and editorial process, or for some other reason. Of the published papers, the nanofluids paper was successfully published in the MDPI journal Fluids and the other 12 are in Elsevier journals.

The adverts suggest an answer to how the authors came to collaborate on the two papers that have already been retracted, discussed above.

The full list of published papers is shown in the table below. Bar the nanofluids paper, all have Qusay Hassan, Sameer Algburi, Aws Zuhair Sameen and Marek Jaszczur as authors. In addition, all of the papers cite the same three articles from the aforementioned Al-Kitab Journal For Pure Sciences from Iraq.

Title	Journal	DOI
The renewable energy role in the global energy Transformations	Renewable Energy Focus	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ref.2024.100545
GIS-based multi-criteria analysis for solar, wind, and biomass energy potential: A case study of Iraq with implications for climate goals	Results in Engineering	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2024.102212
Evaluating energy, economic, and environmental aspects of solar-wind-biomass systems to identify optimal locations in Iraq: A GIS-based case study	Energy for Sustainable Development	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2024.101386
Hydrogen role in energy transition: A comparative review	Process Safety and Environmental Protection	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psep.2024.02.030
Implement and evaluate resilient energy infrastructures capable of withstanding spatial, temporal, and annual weather fluctuations in Saudi Arabia by 2050	Sustainable Futures	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sftr.2024.100182
Mapping Europe Renewable Energy Landscape: Insights into Solar, Wind, Hydro, and Green Hydrogen Production	Technology in Society	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2024.102535
Sustainable Energy Planning and Integration for District Heating Systems: A Case Study in Nineveh Province, Iraq	Journal of Building Engineering	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2024.109411
Evaluation of Solar and Biomass Perspectives Using Geographic Information System – the Case of Iraq Regions	Renewable Energy	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2024.120463
Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Grooves in Fe2O4/Water Nanofluid Pool Boiling	Fluids	https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids9050110
Enhancing smart grid integrated renewable distributed generation capacities: Implications for Sustainable Energy Transformation	Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seta.2024.103793
Optimizing smart building energy systems for sustainable living: A realistic approach to enhance renewable energy consumfaption and reduce emissions in residential buildings	Energy & Buildings	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2024.114354
Advancing Toward a Sustainable Future in subtropical semi-arid type climatic zone: Iraq case – The Progress of Solar Photovoltaic Energy Implementation	e-Prime – Advances in Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Energy	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.prime.2024.100565
Adapting German energy transition rules for Iraq through industry, flexibility, and demand management	Futures	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103411

Authors who appear on at least two of the papers are shown below, along with their institution and country. The authors of the papers are primarily from Iraq, as well as Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Author	Papers	Institution	Country
Qusay Hassan	12	University of Diyala	Iraq
Sameer Algburi	12	Al-Kitab University	Iraq
Aws Zuhair Sameen	12	Al-Farahidi University	Iraq
Marek Jaszczur	12	AGH University of Science and Technology	Poland
Patrik Viktor	10	Óbuda Univeristy	Hungary
Ali Khudhair Al-Jiboory	10	University of Diyala	Iraq
Maha Barakat	8	Al-Turath University College	Iraq
Emad Mahrous Awwad	7	King Saud University	Saudi Arabia
Bashar Mahmood Ali	7	Al-Noor University College	Iraq
Tariq J. Al-Musawi	6	Al-Mustaqbal University	Iraq
Muhammad Ahsan	4	Silesian University of Technology	Poland
Hayder M. Salman	4	Al-Turath University College	Iraq
Muna Al-Razgan	3	King Saud University	Saudi Arabia
Nouby M. Ghazaly	2	Imam Ja’afar Al-Sadiq University	Iraq
Monika Fodor	2	Óbuda Univeristy	Hungary
Amjad Iqbal	2	Silesian University of Technology	Poland
Ahmad A. Telba	2	King Saud University	Saudi Arabia
Ahmed K. Nassar	2	Qatar University	Qatar
Ayesha Amjad	2	Silesian University of Technology	Poland
Hassan Falah Fakhruldeen	2	Imam Ja’afar Al-Sadiq University	Iraq

We cannot be certain which authors, if any, paid for authorship, but we can have a good idea who was running the Telegram channels and WhatsApp group and how the papers in Table 1 were created.

The Telegram channel High–Q was created by @theprofExp, who has the logo for MatLab as their avatar, whilst the channel AQ–Papers and the WhatsApp group were both created by Dr. Ali Khudhair. That name matches Ali Khudhair Al-Jiboory, a co-author of ten of the papers in Table 1. Khudhair’s Telegram handle is @aljboor, and he also has a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching Matlab.

As for the papers themselves, almost all the papers have PubPeer posts demonstrating that figures have been plagiarised from other articles, with small changes in colour or font. The creators of the papers are clearly aware that whilst there are plagiarism checks for text, there are no such checks for figures and infographics etc. How was the new text created to avoid plagiarism? I doubt the authors wrote it all themselves, but there are no tortured phrases in the papers to suggest the use of simple paraphrasing software. However, there are other clues.

The overuse of certain words by ChatGPT has been noted since it came out in 2023, most notably ‘delve’. By searching on Dimensions, it is easy to see that, before 2023, Qusay Hassan had never used ‘delve’ in his papers. However, since 2023 the word has appeared in 23 of his 45 papers, including 11 of the 12 papers in Table 1.

I suspect that the method of the papermill was as follows:

1. Identify a suitable paper that could serve as source material, typically on renewable energy or energy policy in a particular country or region.
2. Rewrite the paper using ChatGPT, changing the focus to Iraq, Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. Make minor changes to figures so that they are not identical to those in the source material.
3. Submit the paper with a few authors.
4. When revisions are received, post an advert offering authorship of the paper.
5. Either when submitting the revised version, or when the revised version is accepted, add in the extra authors. Also add in irrelevant references such as those to the Al-Kitab journal.

Here an example, flagged by Elisabeth Bik, published by Hassan and Jaszczur in Elsevier’s papermill-only outlet International Journal of Hydrogen Energy:

Qusay Hassan, Sameer Algburi , Aws Zuhair Sameen , Marek Jaszczur, Hayder M. Salman , Haitham A. Mahmoud , Emad Mahrous Awwad Saudi Arabia energy transition: Assessing the future of green hydrogen in climate change mitigation International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2023.11.117 

“as of my last update in 2021, policies and regulations around hydrogen are still in nascent stages worldwide”

Bik: “The text contains a sentence typically used by generative AI text bots, such as ChatGPT. “

Elisabeth also noted that 18 of 118 references (15%) went to Hassan and/or Jaszczur, and these “do not appear to support the statements in the text“. Also, Hassan “has been publishing about 1 article per week in 2024“. Hassan and Jaszczur published almost 70 papers together.

It is worth noting that Jaszczur didn’t always rely on Hassan for papermilling. Here is his joint effort in MDPI with the known fraudster Afshin Davarpanah. It is full of large blocks of irrelevant citation and actually a copycat of another simultaneously published papermill fabrication by Davarpanah in MDPI (Syah et al 2021):

Rahmad Syah, Safoura Faghri , Mahyuddin KM Nasution, Afshin Davarpanah, Marek Jaszczur Modeling and Optimization of Wind Turbines in Wind Farms for Solving Multi-Objective Reactive Power Dispatch Using a New Hybrid Scheme Energies (2021) doi: 10.3390/en14185919 

In any case, this scheme was working perfectly for Hassan and Jaszczur until an author of a plagiarised work happened to read the paper from the papermill that was copying them. On the 13 June 2024, Ali Khudhair messaged via WhatsApp:

“Dear respected co-authors, in case you have been contacted from editors of journals for any reasons, please let me know immediately.”

I emailed the publishers involved with all of the information at the end of June 2024 and by early July the channel AQ–Papers had been deleted, though at the time of writing High–Q is still up, adverts and all. Such a swift response has not been matched by Elsevier, and it remains to be seen how long the other papers produced by the papermill will stay unretracted.

The Hungarian

Hassan’s coauthor Patrik Viktor, President of the Doctoral School on Safety and Security Sciences of the Óbuda University in Hungary, deserves a mention also. He even commented as “Partik V.” on For Better Science under an article to defend his collaborator, the German-Iranian neurosurgeon and shameless papermiller, Reza Akhavan Sigari. Read here:

In June 2024, the Hungarian engineering student Viktor retracted this biomedical paper with Akhavan-Sigari and his Iranian minion Abolfazi Bahrami:

Hui Wang , Narayanan Jayasankar , Tamilanban Thamaraikani , Patrik Viktor , Mohamed Mohany, Salim S. Al-Rejaie , Hasan Khalid Alammar , Enaam Anad , Farah Alhili , Sinan F. Hussein , Ali H. Amin , Natrayan Lakshmaiya , Muhammad Ahsan, Abolfazl Bahrami, Reza Akhavan-Sigari Quercetin modulates expression of serum exosomal long noncoding RNA NEAT1 to regulate the miR-129-5p/BDNF axis and attenuate cognitive impairment in diabetic mice Life Sciences (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.lfs.2024.122449 

The retraction from 15 June 2024 referred to emails sent by Alexander Magazinov and Leonid Schneider to the University of Tübingen, where Akhavan-Sigari used to work:

“The journal was initially contacted by a concerned reader to query why the experiments followed German ethical guidelines when the mice were actually purchased in China. At the same time, the distribution of the authors (15 authors from 15 different institutions in 8 different countries) also looked suspicious.

An in-house investigation was conducted which then found evidence of image manipulation in Figs. 2, 5, 6, 7 and 10.

These concerns were also reported at PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/publications/35F42AED9396E6E1173303AC0A9D41.

The Editor requested the authors to provide the raw data and an explanation addressing these concerns. The author replied that “the reason for the similarity is related to the low quality of the original images…regarding the image related to fluorescent, these images were voluntarily added to the article in the first round of reviewing to increase the scientific content (without the need or request of the reviewers)”.

This explanation was not satisfactory to the Editor and, due to the above concerns, the Editor decided to retract the paper.”

“Partik V.”‘s last comment on For Better Science before he was banned was: “Former research criminal is now independent journalist. Busted big time. I wonder how long you can keep up this blog on.“. Then, a “Viktor Patrik” arrived to claim that the previous commenter was an imposter. Which one of the two Patrik Viktors published all those plagiarised papermill papers with Hassan, Jaszczur, Algburi et al then?

Closing Thoughts

The papermill above showcases many of the different problems that currently exist in the publishing system, some of which are hard to fix and some of which should be easier. Firstly, there is such an emphasis on quantity of publications over quality that people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to be an author on a paper in a top-tier, Q1 Elsevier journal. This is ‘publish or perish’, it has been discussed a thousand times before, and change will require international action across academia to reform how academics are hired, promoted, funded and assessed. In fact, these pressures do not apply just to individual academics, as evidenced by the inclusion of irrelevant references to the Al-Kitab Journal For Pure Sciences. Journals want to increase citations of their papers to improve their impact factor or be added to lists of ‘good’ journals, and they will continue to do so as long as journal rankings calculated on citations exist.

Secondly, anyone can start running a papermill. There are no capital requirements or significant technological barriers, anyone can create papers by rewriting already published works, either themselves or with the assistance of ChatGPT or other software. With a Telegram channel or WhatsApp group the papermiller can easily organise the sale of authorship of their papers, either with a close network of trusted colleagues or with strangers around the world. As far as I can see, nothing can be done to prevent someone from trying to do this.

However, the final set of problems is something that can definitely be addressed and that lies with the publishers. Why was it possible for eight authors to be added to a paper at revision stage without the editor or anyone else being notified? Why do authors by default have the ability in the submission system to add authors at all? Elsevier’s system is obviously inadequate, asking authors to obtain permission from the editor for authorship changes but not making it necessary is absurd. Likewise, it is clear that the plagiarism detection system needs development if it is unable to detect almost identical images or figures. Software such as ImageTwin is able to detect duplicated regions of biomedical images that have been significantly manipulated, it must be possible to flag the identical figures at the beginning of this post.

Lastly, research integrity investigations vary from publisher to publisher and from journal to journal, as shown by the two retraction (or withdrawal) notices that began this piece. The first paper was withdrawn due to ‘possible duplicates/manipulations’ of figures. Ignoring the use of ‘possible’ to describe such blatant plagiarism, did anyone check for any problems with the authorship? What about with the references? The second retraction notice shows what is possible, with an investigation prompted by concerns about citations leading to the discovery of authorship manipulation. I can’t believe it takes very long for a publisher to see which authors were on a paper when it was submitted and when it was published, but if you don’t look you won’t know. Trying to find all the problems with a paper, rather than stopping when you’ve found just one, gives you more knowledge of how bad actors are exploiting your system, as well as information that could be provided in the retraction notice so that the wider scientific community can be better informed. If this is a problem due to either lack of a standardised investigation procedure, or lack of time to investigate thoroughly, both can be addressed by publishers establishing such procedures and investing more in their research integrity teams.

Whilst there is any incentive to publish academic papers for the sake of your career and not because you have something to share, then there will be papermills producing papers to sell. There is no need to make their life so easy.

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Footnotes

1. An article appearing online does not count as ‘publishing’, it is the arbitrary assignment of the article to a volume or issue that means the article is ‘published’. This is why the article was withdrawn rather than retracted and why the article is no longer available to view in all its plagiarised glory. However, it’s also probably why the article was removed so quickly. Feel free to discuss the merits of this wherever you prefer shouting into the void.

2. Cross that off on your papermill bingo cards.

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