In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting. Kim hadn’t been told about the paper, nor had anyone asked his permission to use the data. The findings were central to Kim’s Ph.D. thesis and publishing them would mean the data were no longer original.
“I was shaking in the lab,” he recalled recently. “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what to do.”
Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He wanted to be credited as a coauthor on any papers using his results. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper.
But when these efforts to resolve the dispute were unsuccessful, Kim filed a formal complaint with the University of Melbourne’s research integrity office. Six months later, in January 2020, the university launched an investigation, and meanwhile, Xia and Zafari published two papers containing Kim’s results. The articles acknowledge Kim, but not as a coauthor.
For Kim, the investigation was just the start of a long effort to reclaim ownership of his work.
Documents reviewed by Retraction Watch show an investigation panel engaged by the university found a “cultural problem” inside Xia’s lab and research violations of Australia’s code of integrity related to the use of the grad student’s work. But it also found that Kim didn’t qualify for authorship on the manuscript.
Xia and Zafari were barred from receiving grants from the Australian Research Council for two years. Since the early 2000s, Xia has received more than AU$900,000 (US$593,000) from the ARC, among other grants, including for defense-related research. Xia remains at the University of Melbourne despite the panel’s findings of research misconduct that is “wilful and representative of an ongoing pattern.”
A subsequent review by the Australian Research Integrity Committee found flaws in how the university handled the case — including not protecting Kim’s interests, withholding the report, and not investigating additional allegations. Forced to change labs, Kim lost a scholarship and a job offer, and had to repay about AU$90,000 (US$58,400) to his sponsor in South Korea. The university has since offered Kim AU$15,000 (US$9,750) after he sought compensation for the financial losses and time spent doing the experimental work — although without admitting culpability.
Kim declined the funds, continuing to push for his data and his name to be removed from the published papers, and compensation for what he lost, which includes his intellectual property, a job opportunity, and the time he lost to changing his research topic to start his Ph.D. project over again. “I lost almost two years of my life,” he told us. “I feel that they don’t want to waste their time on my case.”
Kim’s efforts to correct the papers containing his work has led to their retraction.
One paper, published in Materials Science & Engineering: A in May 2020, was retracted in November 2024, three years after Kim asked the editor to remove his data and name from the acknowledgements. Before the retraction, Mark Hargreaves, the University of Melbourne’s then-deputy vice-chancellor for research, urged Kim to provide retrospective permission instead, saying a retraction would “represent another sanction of Xia and Zafari … and have implications for the other authors,” he wrote in correspondence we have seen. The editors eventually pulled the article for using data without the copyright owner’s approval. Neither Xia, Zafari nor the other authors agreed with the retraction.
For the other article, published in Scripta Materialia in August 2019, Kim requested in 2022 and again in 2024 his data and name be removed. But the editor cited the university’s investigation, saying it didn’t recommend a retraction, only a correction.
That stance has changed. After we asked the journal on October 14 about their decision not to retract, Kim received an update on October 16 from Scripta Materialia telling him that following an ethics review, the journal decided to retract the article for using Kim’s data without permission, a decision Kim called “overdue and incomplete.” The retraction did not address his concerns about the accuracy and repeatability of some of the results, he pointed out. According to the notice, both Xia and Zafari have agreed to the retraction.
In Kim’s complaint to the University of Melbourne’s research integrity office in July 2019, he reported that Xia and Zafari had breached the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. His first allegation was that they had used his experimental work without appropriate attribution. According to a copy of the panel’s report we have seen, investigators agreed Kim’s data had been used in both papers, which “clearly cut across future opportunities” for Kim to publish data from his Ph.D. But they found he didn’t technically qualify for authorship because he hadn’t contributed “beyond provision of primary data,” the documents state.
Melbourne’s investigation found Xia and Zafari had repeatedly breached Australia’s research integrity code by excluding Kim from discussions about the papers, using his data without consent, and misrepresenting parts of the methodology.
The investigators also described a “broader cultural problem” inside Xia’s lab, where Xia and Zafari portrayed Kim as an “intellectual bystander” on the project. According to the report, Kim was “denied the opportunity” to contribute, even though the panel considered him capable of doing so. This culture meant the panel didn’t believe Kim ultimately qualified for authorship. Xia told the panel that “[Kim] wouldn’t understand the paper,” which the panel described as a “deliberate and intentional” exclusion, and evidence of a culture where “students are not considered major contributors early in their studies.”
In both papers, Kim’s name was listed in the acknowledgements without his consent, which the panel said breached the code’s fairness principle and authorship guide. Xia told investigators, “My understanding is that you do not need permission to thank people.”
The Australian Research Council barred Xia and Zafari from receiving grants for two years, and the university recommended a lab culture review and additional training.
The investigation also found that Kim’s Ph.D. project overlapped with the collaboration between Xia and Zafari. Kim’s formal milestone documents identified the alloy experiments as part of his Ph.D., giving him a “reasonable expectation” that the project was his to develop. Xia told the panel that “it was never the intention that this was [Kim’s] project,” even though he had approved Kim’s milestone review.
The investigation found that Xia’s actions constituted “wilful ignorance or wilful deviation from the code.” They were “particularly disturbed” by Xia’s attempts to justify his behavior as standard practice, warning it could lead to more serious misconduct. Zafari’s breaches were deemed comparatively minor but still “crossed the boundary of accepted practice.”
Xia remains in his position at the University of Melbourne. Zafari is listed as a researcher on the University of Twente’s website, in the Netherlands.
Xia has not responded to requests for comment about these findings. Zafari’s legal representatives said: “Dr Zafari is a highly regarded researcher who has not been found by any university or comparable institution to have engaged in research misconduct.”
In a letter summarizing the findings, Hargreaves told Kim that, based on the panel’s findings and “on the balance of probabilities,” Xia “committed research misconduct,” and Zafari “committed serious breaches of the Code.”
The panel also determined that there were inaccuracies in the methodology of the Scripta Materialia paper. The authors misrepresented the magnifications of some figures, and didn’t report the experimental conditions accurately. Zafari admitted to using “artistic licence” when preparing some figures, but the panel found this was done for convenience rather than to mislead.
Overall, they recommended an “urgent review of student supervisory practices” as well as additional training in Xia’s group, corrections to the methodological issues, and amendments to the acknowledgements to specify Kim’s contributions.
Because Kim was only given a summary letter of the findings, despite multiple requests, Kim said he couldn’t understand how the panel reached their conclusions and he believed their process was biased. So in March 2021, a few weeks after receiving the summary, Kim appealed the outcome.
He later took the matter to the Australian Research Integrity Committee (ARIC), which reviews how institutions handle breaches of the code. In its September 2023 report ARIC described “significant difficulty” obtaining information from the university and found Kim was “significantly disadvantaged” by the publication of papers containing his work — especially since, when he first raised his concerns, none of the papers had yet been published. The university’s six-month delay in launching the investigation after the complaint meant the data became increasingly accessible online.
ARIC determined that the university “did not do enough to protect the interests of Dr Kim” and said pausing publication of the papers could have avoided some of the breaches.
It recommended the university to review its policy of withholding full reports and issue a formal apology to Kim for “the disadvantage he suffered as a result of Code breaches and poor research practice in the laboratory.” In December 2023, Hargreaves wrote to Kim apologizing for “any distress caused during the investigation.”
ARIC declined to comment on whether it has since received any updates from the university about steps taken to address the systemic problems identified in its own investigation.
Kim says the fallout from the case had consequences on his career. He lost a scholarship and associated job offer with a company in Korea after the delays to his Ph.D. and culture of the lab forced him to move to another lab. He was also required to repay two years’ worth of the scholarship back to the sponsor — amounting to about AU$90,000 (US$58,400).
At the start of this year, Kim wrote to the University of Melbourne requesting compensation for the lost opportunity and the time he spent working on generating data he was ultimately unable to claim as his own. In a response we’ve reviewed, Ben Rubinstein, the deputy dean of research in the faculty of engineering and information technology, said there was no finding in the investigation that Kim should have been paid for the work, and there was no employment relationship between Kim and the university. Rubinstein stated the university couldn’t be held solely responsible for the termination of Kim’s job offer and scholarship contract.
However, the university offered $15,000 ($9,750) as an ex gratia payment — made out of a moral obligation rather than a legal requirement — without “any admission of liability” and “in full and final settlement of all claims” against the university, Rubinstein wrote. Accepting the payment would also require Kim to agree to confidentiality and non-disparagement terms, as well as releasing the university from any current or future claims related to his time as a Ph.D. student.
Kim, now working as an engineer in South Korea, says he rejected the offer. “The university didn’t consider my request at all,” he told us. “I feel that my concerns haven’t been resolved at all.”
In a statement to Retraction Watch, a spokesperson for the University of Melbourne wrote: “The investigation identified that breaches of the Code occurred, and corrective actions were required of the respondent researchers. The University has taken responsive action. The graduate researcher was also provided with additional support.
“The University of Melbourne considers this matter concluded and will be making no further comment.”
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While this sounds like gross misconduct on Xia’s part, Xia was right about one thing: that “you do not need permission to thank people.”