How to render a publishing ban moot? Change your surname and just keep submitting.
That’s what happened in the case of Hashem Babaei, aka Hashem Gharababaei. In 2010, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), a professional society based in the U.K., banned the mechanical engineering researcher from the University of Guilan from submitting his work to its journals.
But over the next 10 years, (Ghara)Babaei managed to publish at least 10 articles in the society’s journals, simply using the abbreviated version of his name while continuing to use the same email address from his institution in Rasht, Iran.
“This is a serious issue of academic misconduct,” said Gerald Nurick, an emeritus professor and senior research scholar of engineering and the built environment at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Gharababaei has not responded to our request for comment.
Nurick, who recently brought the case to our attention, said he had hosted Gharababaei as a visiting student for a few months in 2008, but for health reasons could not supervise the work directly.
In December of that year, Genevieve Langdon, a lab member who did work closely with Gharababaei, emailed the student a draft manuscript based on their work together. In her cover note, she stated the manuscript was not publishable in its current form because the data “does not fit with the past 20 years[’] worth of test data on steel.”
“I trust you understand this and will not publish this without my consent,” she wrote in the communication, recently shared with us.
Langdon, who no longer works in the field, heard little from Gharababaei until June 2010, when she and Nurick became aware of two manuscripts their former visiting student had submitted to IMechE journals.
One of them, submitted to Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture, contained text and a table “word for word identical to what I wrote in December 2008,” Langdon told Gharababaei in a letter dated June 15, 2010. “That alone is direct plagiarism,” she wrote. She was also “troubled to find that I am barely acknowledged for my important contributions to your experimental work” in his other published papers when she believed she should have been listed as a coauthor.
The second manuscript in question had been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science. Trevor Cloete, another lab member who worked with Gharababaei, wrote to the journal’s editor on June 17, 2010, detailing his own unacknowledged contributions to the work and stating Gharababaei had published “an essentially similar paper” in another journal.
The published paper, which had appeared in the May 2010 issue of Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines, a Taylor & Francis title, also included text from Langdon’s draft. Yet it only acknowledged her, Nurick and Cloete “for their help with the experiments and for machining the modified ballistic pendulum.” (The journal’s editor-in-chief has not responded to our request for comment.)
A month after that paper appeared, Nurick emailed Kruna Vukmirovic, managing editor of the two IMechE journals, with more details on the duplications between Gharababaei’s published paper and the manuscript accepted for publication. He also stated he had not given Gharababaei permission to publish photographs and data included in the other submission, which also included reproduction of Langdon’s written text without attribution.
After investigating the matter, the journal editors found both manuscripts contained duplicated material and decided to pull them. Vukmirovic informed Nurick, Langdon and Cloete of the decision within a few weeks of the complaint.
Vukmirovic also notified Gharababaei and his coauthors of the rejections.
“This level of duplication represents redundant publication,” Vukmirovic wrote. Gharababaei and his co-authors were put on notice that they “are now banned from submitting your future work to the IMechE Journals.”
Gharababaei offered to add Nurick, Langdon and Cloete as coauthors to his papers in 2010, but the group remained “incredibly angry,” Nurick told us. They ignored the emails because they “wanted nothing more to do with him.”
Nurick’s group didn’t hear anything further about Gharababaei until 2016, when the editor of Thin Walled Structures, an Elsevier title, asked Nurick to review a manuscript submitted by “Hashem Babaei” and two other co-authors. Upon examining the manuscript, Nurick realized Babaei was the same person as his former visiting student. The manuscript included references to the author’s previous work, published using the name “Gharababaei” until the ban and with the name “Babaei” after.
In July 2016, Nurick informed the editor of the name change and Babaei’s history with his group. Nevertheless, the manuscript was published in the journal in November 2016.
Digging deeper into the matter, Nurick also found Babaei had published papers in several IMechE journals, despite the ban. We have identified 10 such papers in three different journals and notified their top editors. John Chew, the editor-in-chief of IMechE’s Journal of Engineering Science, told us he referred the matter to the publisher’s integrity team for further investigation. The editors-in-chief of the other journals have not responded to our requests for comment.
The Retraction Watch Database lists one retraction for “Hashem Gharababaei,” from a 2010 IEEE conference proceeding – one of 53 articles retracted from the conference with identical notices stating the contributions had “been found to be in violation of IEEE’s Publication Principles.”
Although Gharababaei lists a different university in Iran as an affiliation on the IEEE article, Nurick concluded it is “definitely” the same person. The topic of the paper had “no place” in the conference, which dealt with mechanical and electronics engineering, he told us.
Nurick told us he would like to see all of Gharababaei’s work after 2010 with the name “Babaei” retracted. “He’s publishing in two names, and I think that’s wrong.”
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