Reviewer accused of stealing manuscript and publishing it as his own denies he refereed it
Shafaq Aftab, now a lecturer at the University of Central Punjab in Pakistan, learned of the published study last fall in an alert from ResearchGate. The paper, published in Systems Research and Behavioural Science (SRBS) in September 2024, was not only similar to research she completed during her Ph.D. coursework, it was the exact work she had submitted to another journal in late 2023. An email exchange she had with the editor of that journal, Information Development (IDV), confirmed the author of the published study was a reviewer of Aftab’s manuscript.
Social scientist Davood Ghorbanzadeh of Islamic Azad University of Tehran North Branch in Iran denies he plagiarized any portion of Aftab’s work and said his study was based on independent research of "the highest ethical standards". Ghorbanzadeh had two papers retracted in December, 2024 and January, 2025 for significant overlap with other researchers’ work. A spokesperson for Wiley, which publishes SRBS, confirmed the publisher is still investigating the claims, which Aftab raised to the journal in September 2024.
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