A PhD student in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential citation fraud is being sued by one of the conference chairs, a professor of computer science, Retraction Watch has learned.
The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, reaped a prodigious number of citations from the conference proceedings, often in highly questionable ways.
“Fraud can pay off,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his blog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This probably helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”
Aljawarneh, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, also is a visiting professor at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The conferences were put together by an organization called the International Association of Researchers (IARES), of which Aljawarneh is a member, under the auspices of two major industry groups, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Many conference papers published by these groups have been found to suffer from plagiarism and other problems hinting at compromised peer review, as we have reported before.
Pirelli, who moonlights as a scientific sleuth, said he decided to blog about his findings after he reported them to the ACM but didn’t hear back. In July, he got a letter (in French) from a lawyer representing Aljawarneh threatening legal action unless he took down his post. He didn’t.
Then on November 28, Pirelli received a judgment (in French) from an appellate court showing that, unbeknownst to him, Aljawarneh’s lawyer had filed defamation charges already in June.
“This guy is suing me because … I uncovered his whole … scam association that was organizing a bunch of conferences that may or may not have even happened,” Pirelli told Retraction Watch. “One of them was supposedly in Kazakhstan in a time when Kazakhstan was closed due to COVID.”
An ACM press officer told us: “As part of ACM’s plagiarism and fraud practices, we do not comment on ongoing investigations.”
From the judgment, Pirelli learned that the charges against him had been dismissed by the public prosecutor. The appellate court, however, decided to let the lawsuit proceed.
The judgment also revealed that, following the blog post, an upcoming conference had been canceled and Aljawarneh had been removed from the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science.
“It’s like, you know, yay, I did some sleuthing and I prevented more bullshit from being added to the pile of stuff in computer science, but at the same time I now have somebody suing me,” Pirelli says.
But, he added, “in Switzerland, truth that is said in the general-public interest is a defense to libel, to slander, so I’m not too worried about that.”
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