Karimipour Saga III: All roads lead to Rome (2024)

This is the third and (possibly) last instalment of Maarten van Kampen‘s great treatise which arose from one single Special Issue at the Elsevier journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE).

This time, we will go to the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, where the fraudster Arash Karimipour became faculty member and where papermilling became the standard way of doing science.

You can read Part I and Part II here:

And I decided to make Maarten’s article even longer by adding a Coda about another Sapienza papermiller, a Renowned Stool named Pippo.

By Maarten van Kampen

The Sapienza University of Rome plays an interesting role in this story. Arash Karimipour spent part of his PhD at Sapienza, in the group of Annunziata d’Orazio. From 2010 he is full-time employed at the Islamic Azad University, but is frequently invited to Sapienza as visiting scientist. Since January 2024 he is even listed as teaching staff of foreign universities. Karimipour used his Sapienza affiliation in lieu of his Islamic Azad University one to get on the editorial board of Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE):

In his publishing something similar happens, see the table below. Of the 30 papers he published with his Sapienza affiliation only 2 were co-authored with his prime Sapienza contact, Annunziata D’Orazio (2^nd column). The other 28 Sapienza-signed papers often have Karimipour as the sole Western author. And however bad this may be, the use of a Western affiliation may affect the acceptance rate.

Karimipour authored 26 papers with his Sapienza mentor D’Orazio in which he uses his Islamic Azad or Ton Duc Thang affiliation (2^nd row). Below an interesting example featuring just three authors:

In this 2020 paper, Karimipour is from Ton Duc Thang university, D’Orazio from Sapienza, and first author Zahra Abdelmalek from Duy Tan university. Zahra has seven papers flagged on PubPeer, five of them published in EABE. She holds the special distinction of co-authoring the first paper that got retracted from the special issue:

The paper was flagged on PubPeer because it appeared in an authorship-for-sale add on Twitter, reproduced at the right. And according to the retraction notice our Zahra was one of the four authors buying a authorship seat… For later reference I have also highlighted S. Mohammad Sajadi (40 PubPeer entries, 17 papers in the SI), Mustafa Inc (11 PubPeer Entries, 13 papers in the SI), and Quynh Hoang Le (11 PubPeer entries, 10 papers in the SI).

Both Zahra Abdelmalek and Quynh Hoang Le feature in a Vietnamese newspaper article from September 2023 that covers the above retraction (hat tip to Tu van Duong). The reporter finds that Quynh has been fired from Duy Tan University and that Zahra is a ‘ghost’. Despite her using a Duy Tan affiliation she was never on the university’s payroll. And just like Arash’ imaginary twin “Aliakbar Karimipour” (read Part I), also “Zahra Abdelmalek” has no history: she suddenly appeared in 2020 by publishing her first 39(!) papers. The papermill entrepreneur Iskander Tlili was found to be her most frequent co-author and thus is likely her affiliation milker. In that recent Vietnamese newspaper article Tlili is no longer called a superman, but “a dealer who sold hundreds of articles to a number of universities in Vietnam“.

Did I already say that something is very off with that EABE special issue, Karimipour, and his co-authors?

Annunziata D’Orazio

The relational network below visualizes the dependence. The scattered groups encircled in red are D’Orazio’s Italian collaborators. The big blue balls in the centre represent D’Orazio (right) closely cooperating with Karimipour (left) and his network.

D’Orazio could possibly have been a naive victim of a charming fraudster. Except that she also shows up on fraudulent papers that are not authored by Arash Karimipour. And guess what, one of these is even published in the EABE special issue:

A first look at her co-authors in red, S. Mohammad Sajadi and Mustafa Inc, does not instil much faith. The two have combined 45 PubPeer entries and we just met them on the Special Issue’s authorship-for-sale retraction note. The above D’Orazio paper is additionally part of an EABE ‘phenol/formaldehyde/…’ paper mill series that adds many more familiar names:

In bold you can find Quynh Hoang Le (authorship-fraud retraction in SI), Zahra Abelmalek (same, plus a ghost) and Zhixiong Li (one authorship-fraud retraction with Arash, plus 3 more in the ‘Act II’ SI). No good company to be in.

The first four papers deal with the removal of phenol from petroleum wastewater, the last two with the removal of formaldehyde from petroleum wastewater. Finding such strongly themed submissions by unrelated authors is already interesting. On top of that, the abstracts of the four phenol papers are stunningly similar:

Compare the bottom two ‘According to the obtained results‘ sentences:

That is more than a bit odd for two papers that have no overlapping authors.

The citations also show many surprises. For example, the paper written by D’Orazio shares 2/3 of its citations (37 in total) with that of Study of phenol removal… by Albedah et al. One could hope that these references are extremely relevant to the topic. But alas:

Refs. [1-5] to the left were added by our Italian professor and should educate the reader on the global problems related to water. However, the citations include a textbook on organic chemistry, a review paper on boron chemistry, and a ‘q-rung orthopair’ fuzzy logic paper that Rhipidura albiventris would eat raw. And, big surprise, the Albedah paper shares these references: the two chemistry ones return as Refs. [1, 2] and are used to make a point about phenol, with the boron review paper out-of-context. The ‘q-rung orthopair’ paper becomes Ref. [40] where it is used to explain that “dichalcogenides are attractive monolayers in adsorption processes…” And this just continues: D’Orazio’s Refs. [6,7] ‘explaining’ water pollution become Refs. [38,39] in Albedah et al. to support the same dichalcogenides statement. It just seems as if someone sprinkled the same batch of citations through both papers for a science-y look.

These kind of citation overlaps can be found between all phenol papers. In fact, all four of them share a total of 21 citations and many of them are more than a bit far-fetched:

Examples of shared citations between all four phenol papers

The first three shared citations address the use of graphene for respectively bone tissue engineering, drug delivery in cancer therapy, and in cardiac tissue engineering. The fourth paper is about turning biomass into useful chemicals, and the fifth and last example is a News & Views editorial that highlights a different paper presenting the results of a medical trial with a wearable dialysis system. These papers are in no way obvious citations for papers on phenol, petroleum wastewater, and molecular dynamics. And I do not believe it is coincidence that the dialysis editorial is cited by another five molecular dynamics papers, starting with this one that pretends to cure Parkinson’s.

The petroleum wastewaters series contains also two formaldehyde papers that share more than 70% of their citations (26 listed here). They can be linked to the phenol series by amongst others citations, with e.g. another dialysis paper being shared between all 6 petroleum wastewater papers. Also the below odd ‘aquatic creatures, birds, plants‘ sentence, first written by D’Orazio, is strangely repeated between papers:

The phenol/formaldehyde series appears to be written by a single person. Many of its putative authors are known from authorship-for-sale retractions. And I believe that D’Orazio will soon get the same recognition.

D’Orazio has published more questionable molecular dynamics papers separately from Arash. She is also author on a paper in a coronavirus ‘series’ that extends into the special issue:

D’Orazio is author of the third paper (2020), together with Aliakbar Karimipour. For narrative purposes we now allow Aliakbar to come into corporeal existence and we shall briefly pretend him to be different from Arash, who happens to be author on the second paper. Other notable co-authors include Quang-Vu-Bach (authorship fraud retraction), and Roozbeh Savetvand and Maboud Hekfatimar. The latter two share a retraction and an editorial expression of concern for authorship fraud on two molecular dynamics papers. Fun fact: the EoC paper is authored by Sechenov dentist Pavel Kamenskov, who must be a colleague of our Sechenov dentist and renaissance woman Svetlana Danshina, whom you met in Part I. The papermilling mathematician Dumitru Baleanu of the 2_^nd paper also deserves mention: 2024-02 he received his very own For Better Science article, by Smut Clyde:

The two 2020 papers were submitted within 2 weeks of each other. The first 2020 paper purports to show that an (undefined) coronavirus falls apart in warm water. And the D’Orazio’s paper claims that that happens even faster when the virus is contact with a stainless steel surface. Except that it is all make-believe molecular dynamics:

The animation on the left compares MD snapshots published in the two papers, after correcting for mirroring… And what we see is familiar: the red water molecules in both papers sit at the exact same position whilst ‘behind’ them a virus or blue blob shifts up- and down. The D’Orazio’s paper needed a surface, and just like in other production it is Photoshopped in. And way too low, leaving a significant white gap to the ‘water’. In Fig. 5 of D’Orazio’s paper one can see that gap even changes size between frames (right panel). Also note that whilst the ‘virus’ moves, the water molecules at the edges remain stationary. And there is much more wrong.

The 2021 corona paper featuring Arash Karimipour contributes cartloads of citations to selected authors and makes the shocking discovery that a corona virus is actually highly unstable in plain, cold water. Finally, the 2023 EABE special issue coronavirus paper re-uses the same ‘virus’ blob and the same fraud:

To finish this section, a final D’Orazio paper, co-authored with retraction-branded authorship-frauds S. Mohammad Sajadi [1] and Zhixiong Li [1, 2, 3, 4]:

No Arash nor Aliakbar Karimipour can be found. But we still have the usual low-level MD fraud:

According to the text the water is flowing through a channel, dragging along the green particles. Except that the water molecules mostly rotate in place whilst the particles ‘teleport’ around.

I would judge that D’Orazio is perfectly capable of finding her own papermill products and buying her own authorship seats.

Siamak Hoseinzadeh

Hoseinzadeh’s work is mostly focused on energy generation, transport, and storage. His oeuvre contains a single molecular dynamics paper that is published in… the molecular dynamics-themed EABE special issue:

And, surprise, also the other three authors lack any molecular dynamics experience.

Reading the paper one will find a non-existing term: interpolator-filament interactions. A simple Google search brings up a single paper in which that same term is also used: Insights into the morphology and gas separation characteristics of methylene diisocyanate (MDI)-functionalized nanoTiO₂polyurethane: quantum mechanics and molecular simulations studies. There are no authors or affiliations are shared.

Apart from the non-existing interpolator term the papers also share an upper bond/upper bound typo (yellow highlight in the figure captions above) and a plainly wrong equation (red crosses). On top of this they share 38 citations, figure layouts, caption texts, CH₄/CO₂/N₂ molecules, …:

It is easy to guess who is the real author of Hoseinzadeh’s special issue paper: ImanSalahshoori. Salahshoori is first author of the “Insights into the morphology…” paper and receives ‘just’ 12 citations from this self-signed product. The Special Issue paper, however, gifts him 15 citations whilst many of his co-authors drop out:

Apart from the obvious authorship fraud, also the usual citation fraud found its way into the paper. Our Arash Karimipour is the number two citation recipient, nanofluid mega-cheater Ali J. Chamkha number three. And most of their citations come from a single sentence that hands out 61(!!!) citations to any field the authors’ desire:

This Hoseinzadeh paper has absolutely nothing to do with “best and most promising researchers“.

Then, Hoseinzadeh embraced the opportunity for special issue scamming by publishing a second paper:

The topic of this paper is much closer to his presumed expertise: the optimization of a renewable energy system. Except that neither Hoseinzadeh nor his co-authors have ever written a paper using the lattice Boltzmann method².

The authors obviously added the lattice Boltzmann bit to get their seat in the special issue. The abstract promises that a fancy “machine learning assisted lattice Boltzmann” method will find “The best specifications of PCM, including type and thickness“. Except that the type is never revealed and that the optimum thickness of 42 6.92 cm is absolutely useless without knowing what the authors are actually simulating. There is a two page long Section 2.2 “The employed lattice Boltzmann method” that could have given the answer. But it is just an equation-filled smoke screen that adds more questions than answers. At some point even the authors got bored and simply stop the ruse with, quote: “not getting the text lengthy“.

For good measures first author Ali Sohani throws in two out-of-context citations to himself. The paper also has a Section 2.3 on machine learning that can be summarized as “We tried multiple networks and selected the best one“. And no, it is not revealed what network works best, what data went into it, or what data came out. It is all so stupid, it should never, ever, ever have passed peer review. But then again, also this SI paper got published whilst it is really impossible to use molecular dynamics for… image analysis.

Apart from being incomplete, the paper is also outright fraudulent. And not only this paper, a whole series of papers first-authored by Ali Sohani. The full story starts with a MSc thesis on the design of four geothermal and solar energy systems by an unrelated student, Mert Temiz. Each of these designs is spun out into a paper, with ‘multigeneration system 2‘ turning into the paper Concentrated solar driven thermochemical hydrogen production plant with thermal energy storage and geothermal systems:

Whilst turning the thesis chapter into a paper Temiz made a copy-paste error. In Table A1 (top-right, red numbers) he forgot to replace the 11.6 kg/s geothermal water flow of previous ‘multigeneration system 1‘ by the 310 kg/s water flow for system 2 (bottom-left, yellow numbers).

Then our Ali Sohani comes along. He takes the Concentrated solar driven.. paper from Temiz and pretends to better optimize it in three other papers, with the last one being the Hoseinzadeh-authored EABE piece:

I was delighted to see Nader Karimi in the author list, the special and regular editor of EABE that had to ‘step down’. And Mohammad Doranehgard, who has a retraction for a plagiarized paper featuring a made-up co-author. In images the original and three derived papers look like this:

In the first spin-off (top-right) Sohani takes Temiz’ system and artwork (with citation) and purports to find a better working point by doing an important-sounding dynamic multi-objective optimization of three parameters that include the geothermal flow. And would you be surprised that that flow is not 310 kg/s, but close to the misreported 11.6 kg/s:

This is a truly amazing result: Sohani’s three optimized values are all within ±10% of those reported in the original Temiz paper, even reproducing the copy-paste mistake that caused the reported value to be a factor 30 off…

Sohani submits his next paper Price inflation effects on a solar-geothermal system… just two weeks later. In that time he added an inflation correction and made his own equivalent diagram of the system. The results are still very familiar, with an optimum geothermal water flow starting at 10.5 kg/s and an optimum solar area between 20,000 and 23,000 m². Again the typo is nicely reproduced:

The final paper in the series we already met. Karimipour’s special issue came along and provided a welcome opportunity to inflate one’s bibliometrics. Getting a seat required a slight tweak to the system: the ‘parabolic through collector’ in the top right needed to be replaced by a ‘solar power generation system’ that now also includes solar panels. This to fit the lattice Boltzmann topic of the special issue: solar panels can be cooled by phase change materials that can be optimized using the machine learning and lattice Boltzmann ruse:

The special issue paper is completely devoid of any meaning: it is not only left unspecified what was optimized, even what came out of the optimization is not shown. Just that things get 10% better after optimization. So depending on one’s choice, either nothing is wrong because there is nothing that can be wrong. Or the paper is totally bollocks.

Hoseinzadeh not only buys authorship for papers in the Special Issue, he also treats himself on a shower of ill-deserved citations. In the more boring cases these come in the form of “Last block” citations discussed in part I (here and here), or just out-of-context citations as can be seen here. I also found a more creative way. Hoseinzadeh has not written any papers on molecular dynamics, so it is hard to cite him from a MD paper. But two papers (perovskite- and combustion mill…) have their introduction suddenly veer off in a completely irrelevant direction, allowing them to cite Hoseinzadeh. Like, discuss and cite his works six times in a row:

In summer 2023, Hoseinzadeh became editorial board member of two other Elsevier journals: Unconventional Resources and South African Journal of Chemical Engineering. I do not believe it to be coincidence that in January 2024 the papermill mega-fraudster Iskander Tlili published his very first paper in that latter journal.

Ali Golmohammadzadeh

This is a honorary mention, as Ali Golmohammadzadeh did not publish in the EABE special issue. Thus far he just made it to a single-line mention on For Better Science, but he deserves much more. Golmohammadzadeh is an alumnus of Sapienza, having obtained a PhD in its Performing Arts department with a thesis titled Visual Music: Interrelation of Visual Components and Sound.

Ali deserves a place here because he shows that not only Russian dentists, but also Iranian performing arts students can do molecular dynamics: he is author on nine papers in which he shows off his MD and nano-fluidics knowledge! It is no surprise that we already met many of his co-authors on these papers. And certainly no surprise that the ghostly Aliakbar Karimipour is among them:

It does not seem beneficial to inflate one’s CV with molecular dynamics papers when one is studying performing arts. My best guess is that our Ali sold his European affiliation at Sapienza, with his co-authors hoping that this increases acceptance rates. So Ali is possibly something like an affiliation mule, dragging in a respectable (?) affiliation.

CODA by LS: Pippo Berto

Since Maarten gathered you all here to listen to the papermill cazzeggio at the Sapienza University of Rome, allow me to recycle some Friday Shorts material and introduce another great Sapienza papermiller, Professor Filippo Berto.

According to his institutional profile, Pippo is a “Renowned Chair of Mechanics of Materials”, “editor-in-chief or Editor of several scientific journals” and “vice-president of the European Society of Structural Integrity”. Among other things. The man is merely 46 years old, and he already now published over 1200 papers. Some of these papers are discussed on PubPeer, some got retracted already.

This is Pippo’s secret to success. Number 1: double-publishing!

Filippo Berto, Paolo Lazzarin The volume-based Strain Energy Density approach applied to static and fatigue strength assessments of notched and welded structures Procedia Engineering (2009) doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2009.06.036

Secret Number 2: the Iranians! Here is Berto and the Iranian papermill fraudster Davood Toghraie:

Vahid Monfared , Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad , Mahmood Razzaghi , D. Toghraie , Maboud Hekmatifar , Filippo Berto A Review Study for Creep in Different Nanocomposites Metals and Materials International (2023) doi: 10.1007/s12540-023-01405-x

According to Sameer et al, the grass is green, the sky is blue, and magnesium alloys in car wheels are the only solution to reduce CO2 emissions.

Sometimes Berto’s own papers with Iranians get cited by infamous papermill fraudsters like Ali Fakhri (examples here and here). But here is another paper by Berto with the Iranians:

Ali Izadi Ghahferokhi , Masoud Kasiri-Asgarani , Reza Ebrahimi-kahrizsangi , Mahdi Rafiei , Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad, Kamran Amini , Filippo Berto Effect of bonding temperature and bonding time on microstructure of dissimilar transient liquid phase bonding of GTD111/BNi-2/IN718 system Journal of Materials Research and Technology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.jmrt.2022.10.014

Alexander Magazinov also noted that “A number of references that boost the citation statistics of a certain HM Ali are out-of-context and therefore unwarranted”, and he contacted Berto with this criticism. In March 2023, Berto replied:

It was this Reviewer Report, which basically consisted only of this request:

• “https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13369-022-06832-3
• Energy 246, 123441 [doi: 10.1016/j.energy.2022.123441]
• https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-12-2021-0782
• DOI: 10.2174/1389201023666220411114620
• Frontiers in Energy Research 10, 866466” [doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2022.866466]

All by Hafiz Muhammad Ali. Guess what author name stands in the metadata of the Word file. Yep: “Hafiz Ali”.

Berto with even more Iranians:

Mohammad Taher Amirzade-Iranaq , Mahdi Omidi, Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad , Abbas Saberi , Somayeh Abazari , Nadia Teymouri , Farid Naeimi , Claudia Sergi , Ahmad Fauzi Ismail , Safian Sharif , Filippo Berto MWCNTs-TiO2 Incorporated-Mg Composites to Improve the Mechanical, Corrosion and Biological Characteristics for Use in Biomedical Fields Materials (2023) doi: 10.3390/ma16051919

Secret Number 3: The Chinese! Here is Berto with co-authors from Iran and China. His own affiliation is as “Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway“, because this is where Pippo used to work before coming to Sapienza.

Sina Abbaszadeh Hashemi , Khalil Farhangdoost , Wenchen Ma , Danial Ghahremani Moghadam , Reza Masoudi Nejad , Filippo Berto Effects of tensile overload on fatigue crack growth in AM60 magnesium alloys Theoretical and Applied Fracture Mechanics (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.tafmec.2022.103573

“References 11, 12, 15, 17 and 18 are to the benefit of A. Yan and are about electrical components, not fracture mechanics.“

Nick Wise: “On the 27th of July 2022 an advert was placed on a Telegram offering citations in an academic paper. This article is the only one that matches the keywords in the advert according to Web of Science. The advert was placed after the paper had been submitted and presumably after it had been accepted subject to minor revision.“

Again, Berto with Iranians and Chinese:

Farnoosh Pahlevanzadeh , Mohsen Setayeshmehr , Hamid Reza Bakhsheshi-Rad , Rahmatollah Emadi , Mahshid Kharaziha , S. Ali Poursamar , Ahmad Fauzi Ismail , Safian Sharif , Xiongbiao Chen , Filippo Berto A Review on Antibacterial Biomaterials in Biomedical Applications: From Materials Perspective to Bioinks Design Polymers (2022) doi: 10.3390/polym14112238

Berto explain that is was a review article and the cited figure was from reference 135 (Shi et al 2019) and not his. In any case, he wasn’t even bothered that the copyright on this image lies with Elsevier and he never obtained a permission.

This was retracted recently, for plagiarism:

Reza Masoudi Nejad, Zhiliang Liu, Wenchen Ma , Filippo Berto Reliability analysis of fatigue crack growth for rail steel under variable amplitude service loading conditions and wear International Journal of Fatigue (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.ijfatigue.2021.106450

But of course it was not just self-plagiarism, but proper plagiarism, from Huang et al 2013. Moreover, it contained a whole block of nonsense references to paying papermilling fraudsters and Berto’s coauthors from Iran, China and russia -Bokov, Davarpanah, Torghaie, Fakhri etc.

Which brings us to Secret Number 4: russians! Here is Berto with a whole bunch of them:

Sergey V. Panin , Dmitry G. Buslovich , Yuri V. Dontsov , Svetlana A. Bochkareva , Lyudmila A. Kornienko , Filippo Berto UHMWPE-Based Glass-Fiber Composites Fabricated by FDM. Multiscaling Aspects of Design, Manufacturing and Performance Materials (2021) doi: 10.3390/ma14061515

The first author “Sergey Panin on behalf of all the authors” claimed on PubPeer the recycled photo is merely “similar”, and anyway, their earlier paper was cited somewhere.

Here is Berto, unperturbed by the genocidal war in Ukraine, with his dear friend Panin and even more russians, publishing questionable spectra:

Natalia Narkevich , Ilya Vlasov , Mikhail Volochaev , Yulia Gomorova , Yury Mironov , Sergey Panin , Filippo Berto , Pavel Maksimov , Evgeny Deryugin Low-Temperature Deformation and Fracture of Cr-Mn-N Stainless Steel: Tensile and Impact Bending Tests Metals (2023) doi: 10.3390/met13010095

Much of Berto’s publication output is co-authored with “colleagues” in russia, Iran and China. In an email, Berto informed me (typos his):

He also told me:

Uh-Uh. Berto remained silent when I asked if his legal threat was directed at me.