Worrying tales of scientific fraud by Iranian ministers

Kamran Daneshjoo, Iran's newly appointed Minister of Science, not liked by scientists

A slew of plagiarized scientific papers written by Iranian hard line ministers and denounced by Iranian scientists suggests that the scientists are trying to discredit the regime.

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 weren’t 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 didn’t. On the contrary. It is far from over and it may even have very serious political repercussions in Iran.
The story isn’t 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. 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 plagiarized 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 community’s 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 Ahmadinejad’s university thesis during the latter’s 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 innocuous story of petty scientific fraud may well be the Iranian scientific community’s 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.