A construction researcher is watching his publishing edifice crumble, as more upcoming retractions of his papers will bring his total to 61.
Ali Nazari is believed to be a member of a ring of authors whom a whistleblower has claimed are churning out unreliable research — hundreds of papers, according to the sleuth, who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. Nazari lost his job at Swinburne University, in Australia, following a misconduct investigation in 2019.
According to the whistleblower (who laid out the case in a recent email to a journal editor):
Nazari’s publications include falsification of results, plagiarism (including self-plagiarism), and manipulation of authorship. A series of 13 recent retractions by Springer also noted “evidence of peer review manipulation.” To date, these issues have resulted in 48 retractions. I have recently compiled a report, summarized by Retraction Watch, which documents how Nazari’s works appear to be part of an international research fraud ring.
For example, the following XRD spectrum was included in a large number of publications by Nazari’s group. In the three images below, the same spectrum (even with the same noise) was shifted around, reportedly representing, (1) rice husk ash, (2) TiO2 nanoparticles, and (3) SiO2 nanoparticles. Naturally, at least two of those claims must be false.
A number of Nazari’s co-authors appear not to be real people, but rather to have been fabricated by Nazari in order to inflate his credentials. Specifically for your journal, the apparently-fake co-authors were Shadi Riahi, Mohammad Kaykha and Vahidreza Abdinejad. When I say that these co-authors appear to fabricated, I mean that: (1) they have never authored or co-authored any work except as part of the Nazari group, (2) they have no online presence, including social media, LinkedIn, or ResearchGate, (3) they do not appear in the registry of their reported institutional affiliation, and (4) to the extent that their email addresses were provided, these were private addresses, not institutional ones, which could be verified.
Earlier this month, Nazari bumped his retraction total to 56. The additional removals will put him fifth on the Retraction Watch leaderboard, surpassing the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who has 58.
The latest bolus of retractions involve four papers published in Ceramics International, which published 17 of Nazari’s articles flagged by Artemisia Stricta.
The journal said it investigated and decided to retract the following titles:
- “Prediction total specific pore volume of geopolymers produced from waste ashes by ANFIS“, from May 2012
- “The effects of nanoparticles on early age compressive strength of ash-based geopolymers“, from August 2012
- “Prediction compressive strength of lightweight geopolymers by ANFIS“, from August 2012
- “Fuzzy logic for prediction water absorption of lightweight geopolymers produced from waste materials“, from August 2012
And
- “Prediction early age compressive strength of OPC-based geopolymers with different alkali activators and seashell powder by gene expression programming”, from March 2013
So far, however, Ceramics International has yet to officially retract the papers, which have altogether been cited more than 100 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
We asked Elsevier, which publishes the journal, why it decided not to retract the other 12 papers the whistleblower identified as problematic. Andrew Davis, the vice president for communications at Elsevier, told us:
The General Editor of the journal Ceramics International has closely examined the level of allegedly duplicated /plagiarised content in all 17 articles and decided that the remaining 12 articles did not contain significant overlap that would merit retraction.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Getting fired for misconduct in Australia is hard. I remember Kachigian had something like 4 retractions, a halt to human clinical trials and a national news story and UNSW just said, “This is fine.” Swinburne must have had no idea or taken the same attitude until it was finally too big to ignore.
I agree with the above commentator -however, Ali Nazari was a post-doc and so Swinbourne found it easier to do away with him. Levon Khachigian from the UNSW, however, was the Director of the Centre for Vascular Research at one time – I am unsure of his current designation. It is perhaps more expensive and potential loss of business to fire a Director than a post-doc.
Khachigan’s papers have been cited more than 14000 times and his h-index is 64 whereas Nazari’s papers have been cited more than 6800 times and h-index is 43.
How many of those 6800 citations are self-citations? Would removing those affect the h-index?
Yeah you’re right. Not sure what a postdoc is doing with 60 papers but he only brought in a million so he was fired basically as soon as it blew up. Kachigian got up to 6 retractions and remains Director. People were still trying to get him as of 2019 but he seems untouchable.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-17/unsw-skin-cancer-levon-khachigian-allegations-and-retractions/11585768
Regarding Prof Khachigian, in 2013, I raised concerns about the images in JBC 285 4038 (2009) with UNSW DVCR Prof Les Field and DVCA Prof Iain Martin.
In response, in order to obtain the original data that was in the JBC paper, Prof Field asked Prof Khachigian for the original laboratory notebooks from his students and co-authors, Alla Waldman and Jun Ni.
A month or so later in 2013, Prof Khachigan provided Prof Field with two red-covered lab books from Jun Ni, and one red-covered lab book with Alla Waldman’s name on the cover, that was dated 2006.
In the investigation that followed, Prof Khachigian admitted that the handwriting in Alla Waldman’s lab book was his own, and not hers, and he had put together the book in 2013, and backdated it to 2006.
These findings were considered by the UNSW DVCA, Prof Ian Martin, who decided that Prof Khachigian’s generation of the lab notebook in 2013, backdating to 2006, and providing it to Prof Field, who had asked for the original lab book, did not meet the University’s expectations of a senior employee, but was not misconduct.
Prof Khachigian sent corrections of the paper to the JBC in November 2013, using micrographs he said were from experiments performed at the time of the original experiment.
At the time Prof Khachigian made these corrections, Prof Martin said UNSW made a conscious and considered decision not to notify the JBC that there was an ongoing research misconduct investigation into the data in the paper.
In 2015, UNSW made a public statement that no finding of research misconduct was made in relation to Professor Khachigian, and that Prof Khachigian had mechanisms in place to ensure the accurate recording and reporting of original data, and had procedures in place to avoid error.
In December 2018 Prof Khachigian retracted the paper, saying the raw data were no longer available.
“These findings were considered by the UNSW DVCA, Prof Ian Martin, who decided that Prof Khachigian’s generation of the lab notebook in 2013, backdating to 2006, and providing it to Prof Field, who had asked for the original lab book, did not meet the University’s expectations of a senior employee, but was not misconduct.” I am wondering whether my definition of misconduct and theirs is same or not. If a student or post-doc would have done that they would have been fired immediately. Academy is a powerhouse of bullying.
A “postdoc with 60 papers” is likely more of a senior or career postdoc who essentially runs the lab while the professor (PI) is traveling the world, giving talks based on research done by his subordinates.
Yes. And maybe if the responsibilities, pay, and job security were shared more equally between permanent post-doc his PI then the fraud may have not occurred–whether it was because the postdoc was treated with more dignity (higher pay), or the PI was paying attention to what was being published. I can only hope the PI and the school suffer for this financially, but I am skeptical of that.
” In the three images below, the same spectrum (even with the same noise) was shifted around, reportedly representing, (1) rice husk ash, (2) TiO2 nanoparticles, and (3) SiO2 nanoparticles. Naturally, at least two of those claims must be false.”
Two of the claims might be false. Or all of the claims might be false. That the same image was used in three different papers doesn’t mean the image is of any of the described materials. Absent any further information of what the image actually represents drawing the conclusion that “two of the claims must be false” and therefore one must be true cannot be made. We simply do not know what that image actually represents.
But the post never said that any of them were correct. It says “at least”, i.e. the minimum number of fake figures. And so, three is the maximum (since there are three figures).
Note the precise original language “at least two must be false”- that still keeps the possibility of all three being false as possible.
A powder pattern is NOT a “spectrum”