In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting.

Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper. But when these efforts to resolve the dispute were unsuccessful, Kim filed a formal complaint with the University of Melbourne’s research integrity office. Six months later, in January 2020, the university launched an investigation, and meanwhile, Xia and Zafari published two papers containing Kim’s results. The articles acknowledge Kim, but not as a coauthor.

Documents reviewed by Retraction Watch show an investigation panel engaged by the university found a "cultural problem" inside Xia’s lab and research violations of Australia’s code of integrity related to the use of the grad student’s work. But it also found that Kim didn’t qualify for authorship on the manuscript. Xia and Zafari were barred from receiving grants from the Australian Research Council for two years. Since the early 2000s, Xia has received more than AU$900,000 (US$593,000) from the ARC, among other grants, including for defense-related research. Xia remains at the University of Melbourne despite the panel’s findings of research misconduct that is "wilful and representative of an ongoing pattern".

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/11/05/exclusive-melbourne-australia-misconduct-ruling-flawed-investigation-attempted-payoff/

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