How to render a publishing ban moot? Change your surname and just keep submitting. That’s what happened in the case of Hashem Babaei, aka Hashem Gharababaei. In 2010, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), a professional society based in the U.K., banned the mechanical engineering researcher from the University of Guilan from submitting his work to its journals. But over the next 10 years, (Ghara)Babaei managed to publish at least 10 articles in the society’s journals, simply using the abbreviated version of his name while continuing to use the same email address from his institution in Rasht, Iran.

In December, 2008, Genevieve Langdon, a lab member who did work closely with Gharababaei, emailed the student a draft manuscript based on their work together. In her cover note, she stated the manuscript was not publishable in its current form because the data "does not fit with the past 20 years[’] worth of test data on steel".

Langdon, who no longer works in the field, heard little from Gharababaei until June 2010, when she and Nurick became aware of two manuscripts their former visiting student had submitted to IMechE journals. One of them contained text and a table "word for word identical to what I wrote in December 2008. That alone is direct plagiarism," she wrote. The second manuscript in question had been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science. Trevor Cloete, another lab member who worked with Gharababaei, wrote to the journal’s editor on June 17, 2010, detailing his own unacknowledged contributions to the work and stating Gharababaei had published "an essentially similar paper" in another journal.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/11/10/author-changes-name-publishes-10-papers-in-journals-that-banned-him/

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