Professor in Jordan sues sleuth who uncovered quotation anomalies – Retraction Watch
A PhD scholar in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential quotation fraud is being sued by one of many convention chairs, a professor of laptop science, Retraction Watch has discovered.
The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan College of Science and Expertise, reaped a prodigious variety of citations from the convention proceedings, usually in highly questionable ways.
“Fraud can repay,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral scholar at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his weblog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This in all probability helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Pc Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”
Aljawarneh, who didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark, is also a visiting professor at Colorado State College, in Fort Collins, based on his LinkedIn profile.
The conferences had been put collectively by a corporation known as the Worldwide Affiliation of Researchers (IARES), of which Aljawarneh is a member, underneath the auspices of two main trade teams, the Affiliation for Computing Equipment (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Many convention papers printed by these teams have been discovered to endure from plagiarism and different problems hinting at compromised peer review, as we’ve reported earlier than.
Pirelli, who moonlights as a scientific sleuth, stated he determined to weblog about his findings after he reported them to the ACM however didn’t hear again. In July, he obtained a letter (in French) from a lawyer representing Aljawarneh threatening authorized motion except he took down his publish. He didn’t.
Then on November 28, Pirelli obtained a judgment (in French) from an appellate courtroom exhibiting that, unbeknownst to him, Aljawarneh’s lawyer had filed defamation fees already in June.
“This man is suing me as a result of … I uncovered his complete … rip-off affiliation that was organizing a bunch of conferences which will or might not have even occurred,” Pirelli advised Retraction Watch. “One in all them was supposedly in Kazakhstan in a time when Kazakhstan was closed as a result of COVID.”
An ACM press officer advised us: “As a part of ACM’s plagiarism and fraud practices, we don’t touch upon ongoing investigations.”
From the judgment, Pirelli discovered that the costs towards him had been dismissed by the general public prosecutor. The appellate courtroom, nonetheless, determined to let the lawsuit proceed.
The judgment additionally revealed that, following the weblog publish, an upcoming convention had been canceled and Aljawarneh had been faraway from the editorial board of PeerJ Pc Science.
“It’s like, you understand, yay, I did some sleuthing and I prevented extra bullshit from being added to the pile of stuff in laptop science, however on the identical time I now have someone suing me,” Pirelli says.
However, he added, “in Switzerland, fact that’s stated within the general-public curiosity is a protection to libel, to slander, so I’m not too fearful about that.”
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