Publisher retracts paper by Iran's science minister

Iranian scientists press for plagiarism inquiry.

Declan Butler
Kamran Daneshjou.Kamran Daneshjou.Raheb Homavandi / Reuters



Iranian researchers say they are dismayed and angered that a 2009 paper coauthored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, appears to have plagiarized a 2002 paper published by South Korean researchers. The similarities between the articles were revealed yesterday by Nature (see 'Paper co-authored by Iran's science minister duplicates earlier paper'). Iranian scientists say they intend to press for an examination of the allegations, and for the minister's resignation should wrongdoing be established.

Anthony Doyle, publishing editor for the Springer journal Engineering with Computers, in which the paper was published, also told Nature that the journal will label it as "retracted" online, and include an erratum in the next issue drawing attention to the matter. "Springer takes plagiarism very seriously."

"This is a bitter blow to Iranian academic society, it's a scandal," says Ali Gorji, an Iranian neuroscientist based at the University of Münster in Germany, "I'd like to assure the international scientific community that Iranian scientists are honest and ethical, and that they are offended by this stupid act."

The affair has been widely picked up among Iranian researchers' email networks, blogs and some political news websites in Iran. Researchers inside Iran say that the minister has not yet publicly responded to the allegations, but that they expect him to. "There is a paradoxical situation between Iran's determination to boost science and technology, as stated by the Supreme Leader and the alleged non-ethical action by a science minister of the country," asserts one scientist in Iran, who wanted to remain anonymous.
Striking similarities

The 2009 paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi, from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, in many places duplicates verbatim the text of the 2002 paper published by South Korean scientists in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. A smaller number of sentences are identical to those in a paper given at a 2003 conference by other researchers.

"The introduction is copied practically word-for-word," comments Muhammad Sahimi, an Iranian materials scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, adding that so too are large parts of the methods, results and discussion section. "The English of the paper is not uniform," he notes, "Where they have copied from other papers, it reads smoothly. Where they have tried to add things themselves, it does not read as smoothly."

Similarly, almost all the figures, and their captions, are copied from the South Korean paper, although their order is sometimes different, he notes, adding that some are mirror images of those in the earlier paper.

Nature has since discovered that another 2009 article3 by the same authors, published in the Taiwan-based Journal of Mechanics, contains large chunks identical to a 2006 article published by a US scientist in Elsevier's International Journal of Impact Engineering4, as well as material from the paper by South Korean scientists.

Nature has made repeated efforts to contact Daneshjou and Shahravi for comment without success.
Controversial appointment

Many Iranian researchers have disputed Daneshjou's nomination as science minister. "The man's appointment was a political action by the government. He was not selected, nor is he supported, by Iranian scientists," says Gorji.

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Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry's office that oversaw the conduct of the contested presidential elections last June, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. He was also Tehran's governor general from 2005-2008, and is described by scientists as a hardliner with ties to the revolutionary guards most Iranian scientists, inside and outside the country, support the reformist movement.

Many researchers fled Iran during the cultural revolution in the early 1980s. The regime closed universities for three years, and violently purged them of any Western or non-Islamic influences.

Some now worry that a new purge of the universities is on the way, following Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's denouncing in early September of the humanities and social sciences taught in universities as a corrupting influence causing students to doubt and question Islamic values, and called for a revision of what was taught. Such alleged influences have also been a recurring theme in the recent public confessions and show trials of protestors.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090923/full/news.2009.945.html?s=news_rss

Personally I believe he simply reversed-engineered the Korean product out of habit.

^^It is worse than that

Jaras and Norooz sites exposed him. he does not have a Ph.D. as he claims at all.  orginially he hae claimed two universities in England, then it was revealed that he had been kicked out of england as a student who was about to fail as a person who set fire to a book store. The book store in question belonged to Penguine publishers that had published that book by Salamn Roshdi. Nooroz I think contacted both universities and they had no records of him. He then claimed that he had presented his research to Amir Kabir university and they had accepted him as a Ph.D. That claim too was redrawn.

I've heard about his past discrepancies before.He was in fact expelled from UK and barred from entering EU (schengen visa) ever.
As you mentioned,he's claimed degrees from non-existent institutes or from some which have no record of him whatsoever.

Expect to Ahmadinejad to come to his defence with a barrage of;
1-Degrees are worthless papers anyways(like UN resolutions)
2-It's a Zionist/American/Mousavi/...Korean conspiracy.
3-It's all the other guys fault(co-author)
...

Upon investigation, the website discovered that Daneshjou had never been issued a PhD by a British university or any university in Iran.

Among other things, the website reported that when it checked several articles published by Daneshjou in various magazines and websites, it became apparent that none of them had been written in a British university. His name also does not appear on the publication authors list in Londons royal college library or the list of the Royal Institute of Science and Technology in Manchester, two higher education institutions mentioned on the website of the Tehran Science and Technology University, in which Daneshjou used to teach, as two places in which the ministerial candidate ostensibly studied. His name also does not appear in the thesis papers archive of any British university or on the list of PhD graduates in Britain. According to the website, Daneshjou was also not awarded a PhD degree by the Science and Technology University or by Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

The website discovered that Daneshjou was expelled from Britain in 1989 due to his participation in protest activities against Salman Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses, after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a religious ruling against him. As a result, Daneshjou was denied return to Britain and could not therefore be awarded a PhD by any British university (Mowj-e Sabz-e Azadi, August 28).

Following the publication of the affair, the chairman of the Majles Education Committee, Ali Abbaspour Tehrani, noted that while Daneshjou did not have an official university PhD degree, Irans Science and Higher Education Ministry recognized him as a PhD based on his academic record. According to Tehrani, the Majles Education Committee investigated the affair and discovered that Daneshjou had completed his PhD studies in Londons Royal College, but was not awarded a PhD diploma due to his expulsion from Britain. However, he was given a chance to defend his thesis in Amir Kabir University in Tehran and therefore the Science Ministry approved his PhD degree, even though he does not possess a formal PhD diploma

http://docstalk.blogspot.com/2009/09/spotlight-on-iran.html
http://www.iust.ac.ir/find-16.2041.1680.fa.html

It's like they're not even trying anymore.


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#Neda
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_{I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -- Stephen Roberts}


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What an idiot at least try to make it believable..... I don't really understand why they are faking degrees anyway... a phd from a UK university although good academically does not make you a good manager anyway.

haha his email is there lets spam his 4ss

The sad part is,despite their constant ranting about the Western culture,they idolize a Western degree more than any other.
They venerate the high standard of Western educational centers but fail to realize that such standards have only been achieved thanks to a "free" political systems,the same system they oppose!

In any case,I'm off to Iran again for a while.
Have fun guys,too bad I won't be able to access the site from Iran.

good luck surena have fun bro.

Being in the "science sector" myself I can tell you that there are a lot of fakers. So I'm not really surprised that this happened. The important question is: did this guy got sacked once this whole affair got discovered?



When I was young I used to pray for a bike, then I realized that God doesn't work that way, so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness.

Worrying tales of scientific fraud by Iranian ministers

29 September, 2009 06:24:00

Michael Cosgrove

Kamran Daneshjoo, Iran's newly appointed Minister of Science, not liked by scientists
A slew of plagiarized scientific papers suggest hardliners in the Iranian government have been trying to discredit and compromise their own scientists.

The British scientific journal Nature recently published serious allegations of scientific fraud implicating the Iranian science minister Kamran Daneshjoo and Majid Shahravi, a researcher from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran.

Nature demonstrated that the paper written by Daneshjoo and Shahravi and published earlier this year in the journal Engineering with Computers had plagiarized a 2002 article written by a group of South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Much of the Iranian paper had been copied verbatim, and it also contained details from another paper written by other researchers which had been distributed at a conference in 2003.

Muhammad Sahimi, an Iranian materials scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said that the introduction was an almost word-for-word copy. The English of the paper is not uniform," said Sahimi. "Where they have copied from other papers, it reads smoothly. Where they have tried to add things themselves, it does not read as smoothly."

He went on to add that almost all the figures and captions contained in the Iranian paper had been copied from the Korean paper.

As if that werent enough, Nature also unearthed details of another 2009 paper by Daneshjoo and Shahravi which was published in the Taiwan-based Journal of Mechanics and is also a fraud. It is apparently stuffed with content lifted from a 2006 paper published in Elsevier's International Journal of Impact Engineering

The Nature article set the scientific world buzzing, and so it came as no surprise when the French daily Liberation picked up the story and printed its own version two days later in its science pages.

The story might have ended there but it didnt. On the contrary. It is far from over and it may even have very serious political repercussions in Iran.
The story isnt over yet because one of the people to post a comment on the Liberation article just happened to be Christoph Claramunt, a French university professor and director of the research institute at the French naval academy.

Well, to his utter amazement, the very next morning he received an anonymous email from three people who described themselves as Iranian scientists.

He explained to Liberation in an article published the next day that the email contained links to four scientific papers, one of which was purportedly written by another Iranian minister, Transport Minister Hamid Behbahani. That paper was published in 2006 in a scientific journal called Transport which is edited by the technological university of Vilnius in Lithuania.

But the Behbahani paper had not been written by Behbahani at all. It was almost a carbon copy of articles written by Claramunt, another co-authored by himself in collaboration with a Chinese researcher, and yet another, this time by a Canadian scientist, Gerry Forbes.

Behbahani had copied entire paragraphs, pages full of graphs, and other material written by Claramunt, Forbes, and the Chinese researcher.

The offending papers have now been removed from the online versions of the publications concerned, but the scientific journals have egg on their faces. They need to seriously consider overhauling their processes of verification of scientific papers submitted to them for publication.

So now there is not just one frauding Iranian minister. There are two. which was written by an American scientist. And, just for good measure, the Iranians included even more content lifted from the above-mentioned South Korean paper.

But the story gets dangerous when one analyzes who could have sent the email to Claramunt and why.

Liberation points out that it must have been written by Iranian scientists and researchers who must know at least one of the ministers very well, or at least be very close to Iranian government sources.

After all, if they did not have contact with the ministers, how could they possibly be aware of all the different papers that had been plagiarized all over the world? Indeed, how could they have even known that the ministers' papers were full of plagiarised content, never mind who was plagiarized? Just to remind the reader, there are two by Claramunt, one by Forbes, one by South Korean scientists, one by an American and another which was distributed at a conference. All this plagiarized work appeared in its original form in the years 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006, and who knows how much more of it is out there?

This affair has had the effect of a bomb exploding in the world of Iranian scientific research, and the fallout is now flying around Iranian research blogs and sites as well as on some political news websites in Iran itself. Most of the comment is extremely critical of the frauds, which are seen as having dealt a damaging blow to the credibility of Iranian scientists and their work.

One anonymous scientist inside Iran wrote, There is a paradoxical situation between Iran's determination to boost science and technology, as stated by the Supreme Leader, and the alleged non-ethical action by a science minister of the country.

The next question has to be: Why are Iranian scientists blowing the whistle?

It would seem that this issue is a visible example of the hostility felt by much of Iran, including its scientific community, with regards to the elections in June which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Those elections are almost universally believed to have been rigged.

But why Daneshjoo and Behbahani?

Daneshjoo, whose plagiarized paper began it all, was the head of the interior ministry office that oversaw the conduct of the contested presidential elections and their bloody aftermath. He was also Tehran's governor general from 2005-2008, and is generally held to be a hardliner who has close ties to the Revolutionary Guards. It was those guards who were responsible for much of the crackdown in the streets of Tehran and other cities following the elections.

The Iranian scientific communitys dislike of him is well known, and it is for that reason that his appointment to the ministry of science is widely seen as having been a political decision, with no consideration of scientists animosity towards him being taken into account.

As for Hamid Behbahani, his appointment as transport minister may be better understood when one knows that he is no less than the person who personally directed Mahmoud Ahmadinejads university thesis during the latters university days.

The reasons for the unmasking of the two Iranian ministers as scientific fraud is undoubtedly part of the ongoing passive resistance movement in Iran against the current regime.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the beginning of September called for a revision of what is being taught in Iranian universities humanities and social sciences faculties, saying that he was concerned by what he called possible corrupting influences causing students to doubt and question Islamic values. His views on alleged Western corruption of Islamic values have also been a recurring theme during the recent show trials and confessions of anti-regime protesters and others.

In this context it must be remembered that the cultural revolution in Iran in the 1980s resulted in many scientists fleeing Iran, where the universities were closed and the scientific world was purged of what were seen by the regime as Western and non-Islamic influences.

So the real, and very serious, reason behind this seemingly inocuous story of petty scientific fraud may well be the Iranian scientific communitys fear of another crackdown on universities and what is taught in them.

These fears need to be addressed by the West, and if they are founded in any way, the Iranian scientific community will need the support of the world scientific community as well as that of Western governments.

http://www.fleshandstone.net/commentary/1627.html