A PhD student in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential citation fraud is being sued by one of the conference chairs, a professor of computer science, Retraction Watch has learned.
The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, reaped a prodigious number of citations from the conference proceedings, often in highly questionable ways.
“Fraud can pay off,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his blog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This probably helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”
Aljawarneh, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, also is a visiting professor at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The conferences were put together by an organization called the International Association of Researchers (IARES), of which Aljawarneh is a member, under the auspices of two major industry groups, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Many conference papers published by these groups have been found to suffer from plagiarism and other problems hinting at compromised peer review, as we have reported before.
Pirelli, who moonlights as a scientific sleuth, said he decided to blog about his findings after he reported them to the ACM but didn’t hear back. In July, he got a letter (in French) from a lawyer representing Aljawarneh threatening legal action unless he took down his post. He didn’t.
Then on November 28, Pirelli received a judgment (in French) from an appellate court showing that, unbeknownst to him, Aljawarneh’s lawyer had filed defamation charges already in June.
“This guy is suing me because … I uncovered his whole … scam association that was organizing a bunch of conferences that may or may not have even happened,” Pirelli told Retraction Watch. “One of them was supposedly in Kazakhstan in a time when Kazakhstan was closed due to COVID.”
An ACM press officer told us: “As part of ACM’s plagiarism and fraud practices, we do not comment on ongoing investigations.”
From the judgment, Pirelli learned that the charges against him had been dismissed by the public prosecutor. The appellate court, however, decided to let the lawsuit proceed.
The judgment also revealed that, following the blog post, an upcoming conference had been canceled and Aljawarneh had been removed from the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science.
“It’s like, you know, yay, I did some sleuthing and I prevented more bullshit from being added to the pile of stuff in computer science, but at the same time I now have somebody suing me,” Pirelli says.
But, he added, “in Switzerland, truth that is said in the general-public interest is a defense to libel, to slander, so I’m not too worried about that.”
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While sharing the news on both your website and social media accounts, is it accurate to share the photo of the person who revealed the suspicious incident (as if implying that this person is the one violating integrity)?
Other than that, thanks for all your efforts.
+1
Online news does this all the time. Drives me nuts. To the point I don’t look really take in the pictures given how irrelevant or relevant they might be.
It always amazes how often the fraudsters do research on COVID and blockchains. It cannot be a coincidence.
Oh, would you look at that. Also an editor of IEEE Access, the mega journal cash cow of the IEEE. How coincidental this all is.
According to Shadi Aljawarneh’s Scopus [1] he is cited 4705 times by 2172 documents. This means 2.1 times cited in average in each article, which is a very big number. Anything more than 2 can be an indication of artificial citations, while below 2 is healthy. A practical way to study the systematic manipulation of citations is to count how many articles an individual is cited by (instead of the conventional way of measuring the number of citations or H-index). He benefited from such citations mainly for the year 2021. As he stop receiving such citations for the years 2022 and 2023, his citations dropped significantly. 4 h-index of his is for his self-citations.
1. https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=35795030600
Yep, it’s difficult to run a citation scheme alone.
If only Shadi Aljawarneh had a friend X who made sure that a single citation to their common paper is inserted in 500 documents, on top of whatever number of citations to X without Aljawarneh. And if Aljawarneh did a reciprocal job… Then both would be healthy, according to William Hughes.
Lesson to be learned: easy rules are also easy-to-abuse.
According to Solal Pirelli, in almost 100 articles Shadi Aljawarneh had been cited too many. Scale is important. This is to support citations of around 20-40 articles.
Being cited in 500 articles, it is also possible with putting more time and efforts and can be done by bigger operations and significant funding. It is used for supporting citations of a single article.
Your point of view wont contradict mine it just complement it, as those who manage articles to get 500 citations wont focus only on one article. This approach already used by journals to improve faster.
Most importantly receiving 500 citations to one single article has no benefit to a researcher considering the money he/she has to invest. But it is more relevant to the journals to increase IF.
Work of Solal Pirelli can be extended to investigate what journals benefited from those citations. Maybe after all those citations were not to benefit Shadi, but certain journals. Shadi even before receiving the citations had the professorship and same position. He had no motivation to increase citations.
This is practically impossible:
“If only Shadi Aljawarneh had a friend X who made sure that a single citation to their common paper is inserted in 500 documents…”
In this case friend X must publish 500 articles to be able to cite his friend. 500 articles involve at least 2500 coauthors. 2500 coauthors must be on in for a life time of a researcher. It is impossible.
Instead it is not a easy way to write a high quality article to be cited? It turns out Shadi wrote such article: “The COVID-19 pandemic and E-learning: challenges and opportunities from the perspective of students and instructors”. He has over 236 citations in less than a year. So he is capable of writing high quality articles. and no need a friend publish 236 articles to cite him in a year.
Lesson to be learned: Double standard rules are easy-to-abuse. One is exposed and thousents continue misconducts. As RW reported: “Additionally, 43.3% of researchers acknowledged having intentionally engaged in some type of scientific misconduct (self-reported frequency).”. Shadi sues sleuth not because he is exposed but he sues for not following a fair practice by sleuth. Why journals do the same method and no one blame them?
> In this case friend X must publish 500 articles to be able to cite his friend.
Incorrect. In this case friend X must just handle 500 articles in one way or another. Chairmanship of two medium-sized IEEE / ACM conferences already does the trick.
Having three friends, X, Y and Z, instead of one, makes the task even easier than that.
Or Guest-Editing / reviewing for a couple of Hindawi Special Issues.