The publishers of the journal Petroleum Science and Technology have retracted a paper because one of the authors “did not agree to co-author this manuscript,” and did not even communicate with the other three authors.
According to one involved party, the problem is bigger than just lack of communication: The paper, “Fatigue and Low Temperature Fracture in Bitumen Mastic,” authored by a dean of civil engineering in Iran, was “copied word for word” from a Canadian student’s master thesis, according to the student’s advisor.
Three of the authors on the paper are engineers at the Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University in Tehran, Iran, including the dean of civil engineering, Saeed Ghaffarpour Jahromi. The fourth author, B. J. Smith, is listed as a member of the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
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