Nobelium Bilalski, a Gdansk papermiller

Polish Universities are instructed to publish masses of papers in high-impact factor journals if they wish to obtain any money from the state. European Commission gives lots of grant money to Polish universities if their researchers publish on Green Deal topics relevant to sustainability, green technologies and environmental pollution clean-up.

And this is where Muhammad Bilal comes in. He is a perfect fit.

In July 2023, the young Pakistani genius Bilal, who graduated with PhD in 2018 and must be now not even 35 years old but with an h-index of 87, was recruited as a “scientist with worldwide authority” for a 3-year term as associate professor at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Gdansk University of Technology, one of several international Nobelium Fellows in Gdansk funded under the so-called “Nobelium Joining Gdańsk Tech Research Community” program. His annual salary is PLN 400k (around €94k), a lot of money in Poland. Professor Bilal also runs a project financed by the National Science Center for the amount of PLN 2 million (around €470k), named “Development of novel bio-delignification approach for upgrading crude lignocellulose resources into advanced biofuels“.

The Gdansk Polytechnic informs us:

“To date, he has authored over 700 peer-reviewed articles, 150 book chapters, 25 edited books, and 10 editorial-type scientific articles in various areas of Science and Engineering. Dr. Bilal has a h-index of 94 with 34 000 citations (Google Scholar).”

It is a huge scam. Those hosting Bilal in Gdansk know that he is a member of a massive papermill and peer review network. Some profit from it directly.

Exactly the same kind of scam is run the Opole Technical University, by its Vice-Rector Grzegorz Krolczyk and his papermilling guests from China and India, Zhixiong Li and Munish K Gupta.

That’s exactly why people like Bilal are recruited: their “skills” and networks are needed for getting access to big money. For the papermiller, his hosts, the university. It’s public money after all, belonging to no-one, up there for grabs by those who are smart.

Let us then see on what qualification Bilal was recruited as “Nobelium” professor to the Gdansk Polytechnic.

Here one of the earlier papers. Back then, Bilal was affiliated with the University of Agriculture in Faisalabad, Pakistan and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China (where he was doing his PhD):

Muhammad Asgher , Sadia Noreen , Muhammad Bilal Enhancement of catalytic, reusability, and long-term stability features of Trametes versicolor IBL-04 laccase immobilized on different polymers International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (2017) doi: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2016.11.012

Basically, the electron microscopy images were stolen and then falsified.

Here is Bilal a few years later, this time affiliated with the Huaiyin Institute of Technology in China:

Amna Farooq , Ariba Farooq , Sehrish Jabeen , Atif Islam , Nafisa Gull , Rafi Ullah Khan , H.M. Shifa Ul Haq , Azra Mehmood , Nazim Hussain , Muhammad Bilal Designing Kappa-carrageenan/guar gum/polyvinyl alcohol-based pH-responsive silane-crosslinked hydrogels for controlled release of cephradine Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.jddst.2021.102969

Again Bilal with the same Huaiyin affiliation, it seems someone was too lazy to draw a spectrum twice, thus one hand-drawing job was copy-pasted:

Shagufta Saeed , Iram Bibi , Tahir Mehmood, Rahat Naseer , Muhammad Bilal Valorization of locally available waste plant leaves for production of tannase and gallic acid by solid-state fermentation Biomass Conversion and Biorefinery (2022) doi: 10.1007/s13399-020-00989-3 

Another one from Bilal’s Chinese period, featuring his closest associate Hafiz Iqbal, professor at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico:

Nisar Ali, Amir Said , Farman Ali , Fazal Raziq , Zarshad Ali , Muhammad Bilal , Laurence Reinert , Tasleem Begum , Hafiz M. N. Iqbal Photocatalytic Degradation of Congo Red Dye from Aqueous Environment Using Cobalt Ferrite Nanostructures: Development, Characterization, and Photocatalytic Performance Water Air & Soil Pollution (2020) doi: 10.1007/s11270-020-4410-8 

Iqbal graduated with PhD at University of Westminster in UK in 2015, his h-index is currently 103, meaning he must be one Mexico’s greatest scientists of all times.

Before coming to Gdansk, Bilal was at another Polish university, at Poznan University of Technology. There, he ran the Norway-funded project “Designing of peroxidases-based biocatalytic system for a bio-mitigation of emerging contaminants“, funded by PLN 780k (around €180k), as member of the team of Teofil Jesionowski, who also happens to be the rector of that university.

There, Bilal was seen torturing phrases, together his rector and with Iqbal:

Muhammad Bilal , Nida Khaliq , Mubeen Ashraf , Nazim Hussain , Zulqarnain Baqar , Jakub Zdarta , Teofil Jesionowski , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal Enzyme mimic nanomaterials as nanozymes with catalytic attributes Colloids and surfaces. B, Biointerfaces (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.colsurfb.2022.112950 

Until the end of 2024, Jesionowski was not only Poznan University’s Rector, but also Chairman of the Conference of Rectors of Polish Technical Universities, Presidium member of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland, and of course he remains Corresponding Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Another coauthor, Jakub Zdarta (since 2023 full professor in Poznan), apparently likes to hang out at predatory conferences at fancy locations. In 2019, he was at a Magnus scamference in Valencia, and in 2023 he honoured a Cognition scamference in Paris.

This one by Bilal, Zdatra and Jesionowski was struck by the Vickers Curse because the papermillers weren’t paying attention to what they cited:

Ahmad Farhan , Javeria Arshad , Ehsan Ullah Rashid , Haroon Ahmad , Shahid Nawaz , Junaid Munawar , Jakub Zdarta , Teofil Jesionowski, Muhammad Bilal Metal ferrites-based nanocomposites and nanohybrids for photocatalytic water treatment and electrocatalytic water splitting Chemosphere (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.136835 

Same tragedy here:

Muhammad Bilal, Ehsan Ullah Rashid , Junaid Munawar , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal , Jiandong Cui , Jakub Zdarta , Syed Salman Ashraf , Teofil Jesionowski Magnetic metal-organic frameworks immobilized enzyme-based nano-biocatalytic systems for sustainable biotechnology International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2023.123968

“Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have become a promising hybrid organic/inorganic crystalline material useful in a variety of contexts, such as catalysis, energy conversion/storage drug/enzyme carriers, biomedical sciences, and separation [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54].”

[52] N.J. Vickers Animal communication: when i’m calling you, will you answer too? Curr. Biol., 27 (14) (2017), pp. R713-R715

Jesionowski eventually sent me an official letter I reproduce in full at the end, here key excerpt:

“although I do not fully agree with the allegations made, because the scientific level of the works signed with my name and the ethical issues related to them are of the highest value to me, I have contacted the Editors-in-Chief of the journals where my articles with Dr. Bilal were published to re-verify and/or possibly withdraw these articles from the journals. My request is currently being verified by the ethics committee of the publisher and we will be notified of the decision made. Additionally, I have subjected the remaining works by Dr. Bilal, in which I or members of my team are co-authors, to a detailed analysis and I do not find in them any signs of works generated by “article factories“.

Jesionowski, who has 33 common papers with Bilal, wrote that his Poznan recruitment was based on reference letters and endorsements from “renowned European scientists“, but refused to name those. By the way, other university rectors caught accepting gift authorships on papermilled fraud are even less forthcoming, see the case of Anders Hagfeldt:

The Poznan rector also indicated to me to have kicked out Bilal, who then tried to get a new job at the Lodz University of Technology, but failed because of Jesionowski’s unofficial warnings. So then Bilal somehow ended up as a Nobelium professor in Gdansk.

There, the world was blessed with a Bilalian perpetuum mobile: a microbial fuel cell which turns wastewater into green energy, run on phrase-torturing, which is a classic sign of plagiarism and papermilling:

Christina Saran , Diane Purchase , Ganesh Dattatraya Saratale , Rijuta Ganesh Saratale , Luiz Fernando Romanholo Ferreira , Muhammad Bilal , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal , Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain , Sikandar I. Mulla , Ram Naresh Bharagava Microbial fuel cell: A green eco-friendly agent for tannery wastewater treatment and simultaneous bioelectricity/power generation Chemosphere (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.137072 

To be fair, the Elsevier journal Chemosphere (Impact Factor 8.1) rarely publishes stuff which was NOT generated by Asian papermills. It got so bad that Elsevier eventually had to do some tidying-up and retract things (read November 2024 Shorts). There are three editors, two Dutchmen. One is Jacob de Boer of VU Amsterdam (who rigs peer review in his own journal, see De Boer et al 2023a, or DeBoer et al 2017 where De Boer explained on PubPeer that the editor collaborated with him on “an entirely different topic“). The other Dutchman is Willie Peijnenburg of Leiden University (who publishes with Chinese papermillers running peer review rings) The third Editor-in-Chief, Yeomin Yoon from Ewha Womans University in Korea, was the handling editor of the above paper by Bilal and Iqbal. As contractually expected from a Chemosphere chief editor, Yoon also runs his own peer-review ring, including inside his own journal, see for example Wong et al 2016 or Choong et al 2020.

It became soon quite obvious that Iqbal and Bilal also run a peer review ring, editing each other’s papers, with Nawaz et al Chemosphere 2022 (authored by Bilal, edited by Iqbal) being a good example.

Bilal’s official “expertise” is in the chemistry of environmental pollution and its clean-up. So if he says in peer-reviewed Craposphere that Salmonella bacteria are actually “pesticides”, thus they must be.

Omar Bashir , Shakeel Ahmad Bhat , Aneela Basharat , Mahpara Qamar , Sarmad Ahmad Qamar , Muhammad Bilal , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal Nano-engineered materials for sensing food pollutants: Technological advancements and safety issues Chemosphere (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.133320 

That paper was also struck by the Vickers Curse, and so was Bilal’s other contribution to the same garbage journal, Bhandari et al 2021. Also, Bilal and Iqbal’s study in the Elsevier journal Fuel turned out to be also about moth pheromones:

Mehvish Mumtaz , Zulqarnain Baqar , Nazim Hussain , Afifa , Muhammad Bilal , Hafiz Muhammad Husnain Azam , Qurat-ul-ain Baqir , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal Application of nanomaterials for enhanced production of biodiesel, biooil, biogas, bioethanol, and biohydrogen via lignocellulosic biomass transformation Fuel (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.fuel.2021.122840 

“After 10 wt% of MgO catalysts have been introduced, the quantity of hydro sugars has dropped most, and the furan compounds have been raised [116].”

[116] Vickers NJ. Animal communication: when i’m calling you, will you answer too? Curr Biol 2017;27(14):R713–5.

You can read about the papermill chaos at Fuel here:

Bilal is papermilling so much that you will eventually encounter him together with every other prolific papermill out there. He was even seen together with Rajender S Varma (see Kashid et al 2022), who was kicked out in Czechia, twice, over papermill fraud. Here are Bilal and Iqbal with a certain Farooq Sher of Nottingham Trent University in UK:

Hamza Rafeeq , Asim Hussain , Sumaira Shabbir , Sabir Ali , Muhammad Bilal , Farooq Sher , Hafiz M. N. Iqbal Esterases as emerging biocatalysts: Mechanistic insights, genomic and metagenomic, immobilization, and biotechnological applications Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry (2022) doi: 10.1002/bab.2277 

Sher is not just a papermiller. You can read about his scamference business at the end of the article below. More recently he demanded I delete it while threatening “further escalation, including formal complaints to relevant regulatory authorities” (see April 2024 Shorts):

At some point, Bilal joined the papermill and peer review gang of Pau Loke Show, currently professor for petroleum engineering at Khalifa University in the Emirates. Show recently suffered many retractions, see June 2024 Shorts and November 2024 Shorts). He is not really the boss of that gang, rather its most prominent papermill fraudster. In fact, the network seems to grow and grow, constantly gaining new members, eventually it might turn into some nightmare of a global Papermill International.

For this paper with Show, Bilal was accompanied by his close associate Iqbal. The fabrication appeared in the toxic and most fraudulent papermill-only journal in the Elsevier stable, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, which is owned by the Veziroglu family:

Komal Rizwan , Muhammad Bilal , Yassine Slimani , Pau Loke Show, Sami Rtimi , Arpita Roy , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal Hydrogen-based sono-hybrid catalytic degradation and mitigation of industrially-originated dye-based pollutants International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2022.03.188 

Their coauthor Yassine Slimani is another fraudster who collaborates with the russian papermilling brothers Sergei and Alex Trukhanov.

This paper by Bilal and Show, in another problematic Elsevier journal, was editorially handled by Show’s close associate Daniel CW Tsang, because this is how the gang operates:

Swayansu Sabyasachi Mohanty , Shaili Vyas , Yamini Koul , Priya Prajapati , Sunita Varjani , Jo-Shu Chang , Muhammad Bilal , Konstantinos Moustakas , Pau Loke Show , Meththika Vithanage Tricks and tracks in waste management with a special focus on municipal landfill leachate: Leads and obstacles The Science of The Total Environment (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.160377 

Also the coauthor Sunita Varjani has a huge PubPeer record, many of these papers are with Ashok Pandey, who was sacked as Editor-in-Chief of another Elsevier journal, slapped with at least 35 retractions, and not just for papermilling, but also for peer review sabotage and authorship extortion (read July 2024 Shorts and The Hindu). Varjani and Pandey were mentioned in this article:

Another garbage paper by Bilal, Show and Varjani (Kayastha et al 2022) appeared in Environmental Research, followed by this corrected paper:

Gargi Mistry , Kartik Popat , Jimit Patel , Kashish Panchal , Huu Hao Ngo, Muhammad Bilal, Sunita Varjani New outlook on hazardous pollutants in the wastewater environment: Occurrence, risk assessment and elimination by electrodeionization technologies Environmental Research (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2022.115112 

“The authors regret,As informed by Dr M. Bilal there are some issues with his university and he is willing to remove his name as co-author from this publication. Based on his request to the publisher and then as agreed by all co-authors, his name is being removed from this manuscript. The authors and their affiliations for this manuscript should be read as

Gargi Mistry^a,b, Kartik Popat^a,c, Jimit Patel^a,c, Kashish Panchal^a,b, Huu Hao Ngo^d, Sunita Varjani^a,*”

Corrigendum June 2023 (highlights mine)

Bilal’s declared affiliation at that time was Huaian in China, but he was already in Poland. That paper’s coauthor was Varjani and Show’s associate Huu Hao Ngo. In parallel, Ngo acted as editor at another Elsevier journal for this paper by Bilal and his host and rector in Poznan:

Karolina Bachosz, Jakub Zdarta, Muhammad Bilal, Anne S. Meyer, Teofil Jesionowski Enzymatic cofactor regeneration systems: A new perspective on efficiency assessment The Science of the total environment (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161630 

But let’s return to Environmental Research. That journal is controlled by another prominent member of the Show gang, the Danish professor Christian Sonne, read here:

That article mentioned some fabricated works by Bilal and his Gdansk colleague and Highly Cited Researcher Grzegorz Boczkaj. Here a Vickers-cursed paper by Boczkaj with yet another Gdansk Polytechnic professor and Nobelium fellow, Roberto Castro-Muñoz; for all we know Bilal may have been its reviewer:

Sana Ullah , Hameed Ul Haq , Muhammad Salman , Faheem Jan , Faisal Safi , Muhammad Balal Arain , Muhammad Shahzeb Khan , Roberto Castro-Muñoz , Grzegorz Boczkaj Ultrasound-Assisted Dispersive Liquid-Liquid Microextraction Using Deep Eutectic Solvents (DESs) for Neutral Red Dye Spectrophotometric Determination Molecules (2022) doi: 10.3390/molecules27186112 

“As for dye analysis, UV-Vis spectrophotometry is among the most commonly used analytical techniques, as it is relatively robust, rapid, cheap, accurate, and precise compared to the other mentioned techniques [18,19].”

[18] Vickers, N.J. Animal communication: When i’m calling you, will you answer too? Curr. Biol. 2017, 27, R713–R715.

And the next one, in in Environmental Research, was just recently retracted. It was criticised by Hubert Wojtasek, professor of Opole University, for “a large number of errors, misplaced references, vague sentences and tortured phrases“. Not just Bilal but also Highly Cited Professor Boczkaj have a lot of explaining to do.

Muhammad Bilal, Anil Kumar Singh , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal , Tak H. Kim , Grzegorz Boczkaj, Khawlah Athmaneh , Syed Salman Ashraf Bio-mitigation of organic pollutants using horseradish peroxidase as a promising biocatalytic platform for environmental sustainability Environmental Research (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2023.117192 

“This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

An unauthorised authorship change was made when the revised version of this paper was submitted, following suggestions for relatively minor revisions from the reviewers and Guest Editor, with author Grzegorz Boczkaj being added to the paper to replace another author who was deleted. No satisfactory explanation was given for this change, nor was it approved by the editor. This authorship change breaches the policies of the journal and as a result, the editors no longer have confidence in this paper and are retracting it. The journal apologises for not having identified the problematic authorship change during the review process and for any resulting inconvenience.

In addition, one of the reviewer reports was edited by a user with a name matching one of the authors (Muhammad Bilal). This compromised the editorial process and breached the journal’s policies. For this reason too, the Editors have lost confidence in the reliability of the findings presented in this article as a whole and are retracting it.”

Retraction 13 December 2024 (highlights mine)

Why yes, Bilal was peer-reviewing his own paper under a fake identity. Why yes, he kicked off someone who probably failed to pay for the authorship and added Boczkaj in their place. That Highly Cited Researcher explained to me in an email:

“dr. Bilal asked me for help to perform the corrections at the revision stage. I’ve done my contribution with full care and in good faith. I was not aware of indicated situations, i.e. removal of other author and especially about the identity of the reviewers (here I would like to point out that there are many scientists with name Muhammad Bilal). I feel unfairly accused of bad practices.“

Yeah right. As it happens, Boczkaj just published Nidheesh et al 2024, with Indian, Turkish and Chinese coauthors, the last author is the US Greek Dionysios Dionysiou who died more than a year ago, but continues papermilling nevertheless (see June 2024 Shorts).

Bilal and Boczkaj have 8 papers in common, some of them also feature the Poznan rector Jesionowski as coauthor (Nawaz et al 2023, Naeem et al 2023 and Anjum et al 2023, in papermill-only journals Chemosphere and Int J Hydrogen Energy). The two Gdansk professors now recruited a new PhD student to supervise jointly, an Irfan Haidri. The young man is on his best way to become a Highly Cited Researcher: even as MSc student he published 8 papers in 2024 alone.

Now, here is Bilal publishing in the same journal Environmental Research, with Iqbal, a bunch of Brazilians, and ho ho ho, with the papermill fraudster, sexual harasser, thief and unhinged sociopath Mika Sillanpää:

Juliana Heloisa Pinê Américo-Pinheiro , Gledson Renan Salomão , Claudomiro Vinicius Moreno Paschoa , Ianny Andrade Cruz , William Deodato Isique , Luiz Fernando Romanholo Ferreira , Nádia Hortense Torres , Muhammad Bilal , Hafiz M.N. Iqbal, Mika Sillanpää , Ashok Kumar Nadda Effective adsorption of diclofenac and naproxen from water using fixed-bed column loaded with composite of heavy sugarcane ash and polyethylene terephthalate Environmental Research (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2022.112971 

Sillanpää was sacked in Finland in 2019, his crimes became a national scandal, but he was soon employed as professor by Sonne’s own University of Aarhus in Denmark, read here:

The international peer community stood to poor Mika, not despite but exactly because he sexually abuses and bullies his subordinates and steals money from his university. Here is the Chief Editor for Special issues at Environmental Research, the Spanish professor Avelino Núñez Delgado, with Bilal, Varjani, Show and Sillanpää:

Vishal Hadiya , Kartik Popat , Shaili Vyas , Sunita Varjani, Meththika Vithanage , Vijai Kumar Gupta, Avelino Núñez Delgado , Yaoyu Zhou , Pau Loke Show, Muhammad Bilal , Zhien Zhang , Mika Sillanpää , Swayansu Sabyasachi Mohanty , Zeel Patel Biochar production with amelioration of microwave-assisted pyrolysis: Current scenario, drawbacks and perspectives Bioresource Technology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.biortech.2022.127303 

I wonder if possibly the German biochar expert Jörg Rinklebe (a close associate of Show, Sonne and the rest of the gang, whitewashed by his University of Wuppertal, see July 2024 Shorts) was the editor here, but the journal doesn’t tell. Rinklebe was however named as editor on Bilal et al Environmental pollution 2022, where Bilal was accompanied by his best friend Iqbal and the Spanish papermiller Damià Barceló, director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research and an associate of Rinklebe and Sonne. Barcelo is obviously another prominent and rather central member of that massive Papermill International network.

Barcelo not only coauthors Bilal’s and Iqbal’s papers (here is Bilal et al 2021 by this trio, edited by the Iranian papermill fraudster Yasser Vasseghian), he also acts as their handling editor, on oodles of papers in the journal The Science of the total environment (STOTEN) where Barcelo remains Editor-in-Chief. See for example Torres Castillo et al 2020, Bilal et al 2020, Ali et al 2020, Bilal & Iqbal 2019, Rasheed et al 2019, or this:

Khadija Al-Omran , Ezzat Khan, Nisar Ali , Muhammad Bilal Estimation of COVID-19 generated medical waste in the Kingdom of Bahrain The Science of the total environment (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.149642 

But then again, Barcelo even edits his own papers, see Sanchis et al 2016. Elsevier will never let him go – white papermillers are a very valuable asset. As El Pais reported last year, Barcelo (who publishes a paper very 3 days) makes obscene money taking Saudi bribes, see also April 2023 Shorts.

Here another one by Bilal with Varjani and another known papermiller, Abbas Rahdar; the editor here was yet another member of Show’s Papermill International, Su Shiung Lam:

Ahmad Farhan , Ehsan Ullah Rashid , Muhammad Waqas , Haroon Ahmad , Shahid Nawaz , Junaid Munawar , Abbas Rahdar , Sunita Varjani , Muhammad Bilal Graphene-based nanocomposites and nanohybrids for the abatement of agro-industrial pollutants in aqueous environments Environmental pollution (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119557 

Read about Rahdar here:

In parallel, Bilal published Bilal et al 2022 in the same journal with SS Lam and Hafiz Iqbal, there the handling editor was yet another member of Papermill International, Yong Sik Ok. In the same year, Bilal published this citation delivery vehicle together with Rahdar, plus Rahdar’s papermilling associates Mahmood Barani and Sadanand Pandey:

Saman Sargazi , Mahwash Mukhtar , Abbas Rahdar, Muhammad Bilal , Mahmood Barani , Ana M. Díez-Pascual , Razieh Behzadmehr , Sadanand Pandey Opportunities and challenges of using high-sensitivity nanobiosensors to detect long noncoding RNAs: A preliminary review International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2022.02.082 

Smut Clyde studied the references section and wondered about “the grinding / machining oeuvre of Changhe Li“, and other citations totally irrelevant to the presumed topic of the study but relevant to people who paid to be cited.

The paper Rowan et al Chemosphere 2022 by Bilal, Iqbal and Rahdar was editorially handled by the aforementioned member of Papermill International, Yasser Vasseghian. And so was Bilal’s and Iqbal’s paper González-González et al STOTEN 2022. That’s how papermillers operate, once they have their own people inside a journal, they take it over like a parasitic fungus infecting an ant.

But now enjoy this contribution by Bilal and Rahdar, and their hilariously tortured phrases like “individuals bite the dust“, “provocative illness“, “watery arrangement“, “medication conveyance“, “world wellbeing association“, or the references to “bosom“:

Kuruvalli Gouthami , Lavanya Lakshminarayana , Basheerabegum Faniband , V. Veeraraghavan , Muhammad Bilal , Ram Naresh Bhargava , Luiz Fernando Romanholo Ferreira , Abbas Rahdar , Siddappa Kakkameli , Sikandar I. Mulla Introduction to polymeric nanomaterials Smart Polymer Nanocomposites (2023) doi: 10.1016/b978-0-323-91611-0.00008-6 

Another PubPeer user found out that the text was stolen from Raja et al 2019 before it was paraphrased into tortured rubbish to avoid plagiarism detection.

“Watery arrangements” also happened in another plagiarised fabrication by Bilal, Iqbal and Rahdar, Hussain et al Chemosphere 2022. More phrase torture:

D. Sadananda , A. M. M. Mallikarjunaswamy , C. N. Prashantha , Ramanjaneyulu Mala , Kuruvalli Gouthami , Lavanya Lakshminarayana , Luiz Fernando Romanholo Ferreira , Muhammad Bilal , Abbas Rahdar , Sikandar I. Mulla Recent development in chemosensor probes for the detection and imaging of zinc ions: a systematic review Chemical Papers (2022) doi: 10.1007/s11696-022-02284-z 

Yet another tortured paper by Bilal, Rahdar and their associate Sikandar Mulla (Gouthami et al 2022) contained phrases like “invulnerable framework” and “populace thickness“. But this one by these gentlemen was retracted:

Kuruvalli Gouthami , Vadamalai Veeraraghavan , Abbas Rahdar , Muhammad Bilal , Anshuman Shah , Vandna Rai , Dummi Mahadevan Gurumurthy , Luiz Fernando Romanholo Ferreira , Juliana Heloisa Pinê Américo-Pinheiro , Satish Kumar Murari , Sanjay Kalia , Sikandar I. Mulla WITHDRAWN: Molecular docking used as an advanced tool to determine novel compounds on emerging infectious diseases: A systematic review Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2022.10.001 

The undated retraction note was brief:

“This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.”

The young genius Bilal even published a book in 2023, titled “Genomics Approach to Bioremediation“. His coauthors are Iqbal, Vineet Kumar (assistant professor in at Goenka University in India) and Luiz Fernando Romanholo Ferreira (associate professor at Tiradentes University in Brazil). The latter is a member of Bilal’s and Iqbal’s network with Rahdar and Mulla, together with these two gentlemen Ferreira contributed a chapter on “Microbial Biodegradation and Biotransformation of Petroleum Hydrocarbons“. Kumar is even worse: he is an associate of the infamous fraudster Abhijit Dey, who runs his own private papermill! In fact, the allround expert Dey contirubuted a chapter on “CRISPR/Cas Editing in Relation to Phytoremediation”. The other book authors are all Indian with some occasional Brazilians. Buy now before this wisdom is sold out.

You see now what Gdansk Polytechnic gained by recruiting Bilal as their professor for 3 years. In 2026, Bilal will be gone and not their problem anymore. But the public money his fraud helped embezzle will be all put to good use and make some people very happy. Same kind of scam goes on in other Polish universities:

---

Notes:

• This article was edited on 23.12.2024 to change the erroneos references to “Gdansk University”. Correct is that the Gdansk University of Technology (or Gdansk Polytechnic) is the employer of Bilal. Gdansk University is a different instituion, see their spokesperson’s message in the comment section.
• Neither Bilal nor the leaders of the Gdansk Polytechnic replied to my email. The Poznan rector Jesionowski however did reply eventually, below is his letter. It ends with “Dr. Bilal and Dr. Boczkaj […] have currently no connections with my research group and with Poznan University of Technology as well.” That despite Jesionowski’s 33 common papers with Bilal, 3 of them with Boczkaj. Zdatra et al 2022 for example has as coauthor a certain Long D. Nghiem, an associate of Varjani and Sonne. Another paper by Zdarta and Jesionowski with Nghiem (but without Bilal), Wolny et al 2022, was criticised on PubPeer because “the error bars are very similar or identical for each measurement/condition“.

• The main problem with sleuthing Bilal’s work is his name, it is too common in Pakistan and there are quite many Muhammad Bilals of PubPeer, some have an extra name, some don’t. Note also that the Pau Loke Show/Jörg Rinklebe/Daniel Tsang /Yong Sik Ok vortex also includes a Muhammad Bilal Shakoor, who is a different person, with a separate PubPeer record.

• In this regard, a reader assembled a list of PubPeer entries applying to “our” Bilal of Gdansk:

As a final thought: is it really credible that the Rector of Poznan University Jesionowski and Bilal’s current hosts at Gdansk Polytechnic really thought he was some kind of a youthful genius and a wunderkind progeny? Did they really believe his publication record is based on scientific activities and not on buying authorships and citations from Pakistani and Iranian papermills, and on running peer-review rings? Did these Polish professors really not see through, and have confused that fraudulent imposter from nowhere Asia to be as educated and as knowledgable an expert on environmental pollution science like, say, a German or a Danish professor?

Like… Jörg Rinklebe or Christian Sonne?

Oops.

I’ll show myself out.

---