Xing Wu
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A group of structural engineering researchers based in Iran have lost at least five papers for problems with data – and a data sleuth says more appear flimsy 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 from the Department of Civil Engineering at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad. Karimipour’s LinkedIn profile lists an affiliation with the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019 through January of this year.
The newspaper, an Elsevier headline, says it began investigating the documents after a whistleblower raised questions about the integrity of the data. In some cases, for example, data from one article was found in other articles but was presented as demonstrating different material. The authors have also used images from other researchers or the internet without proper attribution.
Here is the notice for “Experimental Study on Bending Behavior and Ductility Ratio of Steel Fiber Recycled Coarse Aggregate Concrete Beams” of 2018:
Following receipt of complaints from whistleblowers, an investigation of this document and related documents was conducted. The editor no longer has confidence in the scientific integrity of this article.
The test program reported in this article is the same as that reported in Construction and Building Materials, 2019, 204, pp. 809–827. Primary test results were standardized differently in each article. Material properties and blend designs were reported differently although they are the same.
The review goes on to identify images found in at least half a dozen other publications:
having different and unrecognized specimen designations in both cases. Such a practice of renaming specimens has the effect of distorting scientific records and seemingly inflating the amount of data available. …
The XRD spectra in this article have been published in other articles by the same author group, sometimes reported as representing different materials.
He concludes :
Communication with a co-author, Jorge De Brito, raised further concerns about the integrity of this work as he expressed that he no longer had confidence in its content.
The other three articles, “Mechanical and durability properties of rubberized concrete reinforced with steel fibers”, from 2020, “Shear behavior of concrete beams with recycled aggregates and steel fibers”, from 2019, and “Influence of steel fibers on the mechanical properties and physical performance of self-compacting concretes made with waste and fillers”, as of 2020, carry similar notices.
A fifth article, “Shear and Bending Performance of Low-, Normal-, and High-Strength Concrete Beams Reinforced with SMA, GFRP, and Steel Longitudinal Bars,” has been removed from Artwork earlier this month with the following notice:
The editor no longer has confidence in the scientific integrity of this article because similar images have been used in various articles in multiple journals claiming varying conditions, which violates our publication policies. The article mentioned above has duplicate photos in the article itself, which are labeled as different specimens with different concrete strengths. These same photos overlap with other published articles, in particular 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 papers all consider experiments with concrete beams with recycled aggregates and steel fibers, some with jacketed concrete. There should be no overlap in the specimens between these and the paper mentioned above. 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, with no attributes.
Karimipour and Ghalehnovi have at least three other articles with De Brito that have appeared in MDPI journals. Two of these articles mention Karimipour as being affiliated with the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso – which is not an actual institution, although the University of Texas at El Paso of course is.
Meanwhile, pseudonymous detective Artemisia Stricta, whose work has led to dozens of retractions and who reported some of the group’s articles to Construction and building materialscopied us from an email sent on March 6, 2022, informing the editors of nine journals – the Cleaner Production Journal; Building Engineering Journal; Works; Cement and concrete composites; The mechanics of materials; Materials; Applied Science; Concrete Research Magazine; and Artwork – “apparent misconduct in publication (falsification, plagiarism and self-plagiarism)” in your journals affecting ten articles. All of the articles implicate Karimipour and De Brito, and most implicate Ghalehnovi.
Karimipour and Ghalehnovi did not respond to requests for comment.
De Brito, the editor of Building Engineering Journal and a professor from the University of Lisbon, told us he was blindsided by the retractions:
I first became aware of these issues when I received a retraction notice for another CBM item [Editor’s note: which has not been retracted] and the next day when one of the whistleblowers tipped me off about it. It is one of my junior colleagues who did not have the decency to warn me BEFORE denouncing, leaving me in a terrible situation.
I exchanged emails with Prof. Ghalehnovi about this and gathered a lot of information from these and other articles that I co-authored with him and Arash Karimipour (AK).
I am satisfied that Professor Ghalehnovi did not willfully participate in any wrongdoing and that the issues with these and other documents were entirely the responsibility of AK.
I am also convinced that there was nothing radically wrong ethically in the first articles that AK published with either of us and that at some point AK understood that he could dramatically increase his post rate by cheating, but never told us about it.
Therefore, I believe the first two articles should NOT have been taken down as they were the first to be published and none of the material in them has been published elsewhere, and they are also the result of experimental work honest and traceable made under the supervision of Professor Ghalehnovi.
Additionally, there are other perpetrators involved who have nothing to do with these issues, and they are being mistreated.
Do I also have to remove the other papers? De Brito hesitated:
It’s not for me to decide. I have not analyzed each of them, using the means used by whistleblowers. However, as soon as I understood that I could not trust AK, I informed the editors of all my articles with him of my loss of confidence. In my opinion, each article must be analyzed individually by the journals’ own organs. I believe most of them will be clear upon fair examination, but that’s just a guess.
Hat tip: Clyde Coal
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