Engineers’ research starts to look shaky as retractions mount

A group of structural engineering researchers based in Iran has lost at least five papers for problems with the data – and a data sleuth says more look shaky, too. 

Four of the articles appeared in Construction and Building Materials between 2018 and 2020 and were written by a changing cast of characters with two constants: Mansour Ghalehnovi and Arash Karimipour, both of the Department of Civil Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Karimipour’s LinkedIn profile lists an affiliation with the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019 to January of this year. 

The journal, an Elsevier title, says it began investigating the papers after a whistleblower raised questions about the integrity of the data. In some cases, for example, data in one article were found in other papers but were represented as demonstrating different materials. The authors also used images from other researchers or the internet without proper attribution. 

Here’s the notice for “Experimental study on the flexural behaviour and ductility ratio of steel fibres coarse recycled aggregate concrete beams,” from 2018: 

Following receipt of whistle-blower complaints, an investigation of this and related papers was conducted. The Editor-in-Chief no longer has confidence in the scientific integrity of this paper.

The test program reported in this paper is the same as that reported in Construction and Building Materials, 2019, 204, pp. 809–827. The primary test results have been normalised in a different manner in each paper. Material properties and mix designs have been reported in a different manner although are the same.

The notice goes on to identify images found in at least a half-dozen other publications:

having different specimen designations and unacknowledged in either case. Such practice of renaming specimens has the effect of distorting the scientific record and seemingly inflating the amount of data available. …

The XRD spectra in this paper have been published in other papers by the same group authors, sometimes reported as representing different materials.

It concludes:

Communication with one co-author, Jorge De Brito, raised further concerns with the integrity of this work to the extent that he has expressed that he no longer has confidence in its content.

The three other articles, “Mechanical and durability properties of steel fibre-reinforced rubberised concrete,” from 2020, “Shear behaviour of concrete beams with recycled aggregate and steel fibres,” from 2019, and “Influence of steel fibres on the mechanical and physical performance of self-compacting concrete manufactured with waste materials and fillers,” from 2020, carry similar notices. 

A fifth paper, “Shear and flexural performance of low, normal and high-strength concrete beams reinforced with longitudinal SMA, GFRP and steel rebars,” was retracted from Engineering Structures earlier this month with the following notice:

The Editor-in-Chief no longer has confidence in the scientific integrity of this paper as similar images have been used in various articles in multiple journals claiming varying conditions, which violates our publishing policies. The article mentioned above, has some duplicated photos within the article itself, that are labelled as different specimens with different strengths of concrete. These same photos overlap with other published articles, specifically Construction and Building Materials, 2019, 204, pp. 809–827; Construction and Building Materials, 2018, 186, pp. 400–422 and Magazine of Concrete Research, 2021, 73, 12, pp 608–626. These articles all consider experiments with concrete beams with recycled aggregate and steel fibers, some with jacketed concrete. There should be no overlap in the specimens between these and the above mentioned paper. Figure 7 is captioned to lead the reader to believe that these are photos of the rebar used, the three types used in the specimens. All of these photos are taken from other sources on the internet, some of which are copyrighted, without attribute.

Karimipour and Ghalehnovi have at least three other papers with De Brito that appeared in MDPI journals. Two of those articles list Karimipour as being affiliated with the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas University at El Paso – which is not a real institution, although of course the University of Texas at El Paso is. 

Meanwhile, the pseudonymous sleuth Artemisia Stricta, whose work has led to scores of retractions and who flagged some papers by the group to Construction and Building Materials, copied us on an email sent March 6, 2022, notifying the editors of nine journals – the Journal of Cleaner Production; Journal of Building Engineering;  Structures; Cement and Concrete Composites; Mechanics of Materials; Materials; Applied Sciences; Magazine of Concrete Research; and Engineering Structures – of “apparent publication misconduct (falsification, plagiarism, and self-plagiarism)” in your journals affecting ten papers. All of the papers involve Karimipour and De Brito, and most involve Ghalehnovi.

Karimipour and Ghalehnovi did not respond to requests for comment. 

De Brito, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Building Engineering and a professor at the  University of Lisbon, told us he was blindsided by the retractions:

I have first learned about these problems when I received a retraction notice about another paper from CBM [Editor’s note: which has not been retracted] and the very next day when one of the whistle blowers warned me about this. He is a junior colleague of mine who did not have the decency to warn me BEFORE he blew the whistle, leaving me in a terrible situation.

I have exchanged emails with Prof. Ghalehnovi about this and I have collected lots of information about these and other papers that I co-authored with him and Arash Karimipour (AK).

I am convinced that Prof. Ghalehnovi has not participated willingly in any wrongdoings and that the issues with these and other papers were totally AK’s responsibility.

I am also convinced that there was nothing drastically wrong in terms of ethics in the first papers AK published with either of us and that at some stage AK understood that he could drastically increase his publication rate by cheating, but never informed us about it.

Therefore, it is my belief that the first two papers should NOT have been retracted because they were the first to be published and none of the material in them was published anywhere else, and they also resulted from honest traceable experimental work done under the supervision of Prof. Ghalehnovi.

Furthermore, there are other authors involved that had nothing to do with these problems, and they are being mistreated.

Should the other papers also be retracted? De Brito demurred: 

That’s not for me to decide. I did not analyse each one, using the means the whistle blowers used. However, as soon as I understood I could not trust AK, I informed the editors of all my papers with him of my loss of confidence. In my opinion, each paper must be analysed individually by the proper bodies of the journals. I believe most of them will come clean after a fair examination but that is simply a guess.

Hat tip: Smut Clyde

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