The email arrived on a Saturday morning in July last year.
The recipient was a person known only as "Artemisia Stricta", a moniker they adopted when they started their secret career as an online sleuth exposing academic fraud.
The message was from a NSW police constable investigating death threats intended for the elusive scientific whistleblower.
The threats against Artemisia Stricta and their family had been sent to the wrong person.
While these threats were misdirected, the whistleblower, whose alias is the scientific name of a plant endemic to Central Asia, knows their work has made them some fierce enemies.
"I am concerned for my safety. My family has begged me to stop doing this work," Artemisia Stricta told the ABC via encrypted email.
That work has included spending hundreds of hours reviewing scientific papers in the field of construction engineering, an academic discipline not typically known for drama or intrigue.
What the whistleblower has uncovered is shocking: Hundreds of published scientific papers dating back a decade based on dodgy science involving multiple researchers working at Australian universities.
The most infamous is former Swinburne University engineer Ali Nazari, who left the university under a cloud in 2019 after one publisher took the unusual step of simultaneously retracting 22 of his papers.
Two years earlier, he had received the vice-chancellor's award for research excellence and was also awarded grants worth more than $1 million.
He has since entered another kind of hall of fame, becoming the fourth most-retracted scientist of all time with more than 86 retractions against his name.
"This case is unique in the magnitude and obviousness of the misconduct," Artemisia Stricta said.
'Sock puppets' and fabricated authors
They began investigating after noticing anomalies in Dr Nazari's work as part of a routine literature review in 2019.
As time went on, they discovered fabricated results, plagiarism and bizarrely, a group of fictitious scientists that appeared to have been invented to co-author, review or cite Dr Nazari's work.
The whistleblower says five of Dr Nazari's co-authors do not appear to exist in real life while another author who heavily cites Dr Nazari does not appear to exist.
One of the mysterious co-authors is "Shadi Riahi", whose affiliation was listed on publications as Islamic Azad University.
Riahi's publication record shows more than 100 papers, dating back to 2010. All were co-authored by Dr Nazari.
A spokesperson from Islamic Azad University told the ABC through a translator that no-one by that name had ever worked at the university.
However, curiously, records showed that between 2009 and 2011, while Dr Nazari was working at the university, there was a metallurgy masters student by the same name.
Several of the Riahi/Nazari publications had other authors listed who appeared to have no online presence or publications without Dr Nazari.
More than 46 of Shadi Riahi's publications with Dr Nazari have now been retracted for plagiarism, duplication of data and forged authorship.
"It appears that the purpose of fabricating the identity of Shadi Riahi was to lend credence to some of Nazari's works. It would have looked suspicious for him, as an inexperienced researcher, to publish roughly 70 papers as sole author," Artemisia Stricta said.
After attempting to contact Ali Nazari for comment, I received an email from a person calling themselves Shadi Riahi.
The person said they were reaching out after reading an article I had published on Dr Nazari almost three years ago.
They wanted me to know about other examples of researchers in the field publishing questionable research.
"As a person who has been working in the field, I can provide more than 1,000 papers with such problems," the person wrote.
"In summary, this should be mentioned that it's more about who you are and what position you own than what you have done in the field, and decisions are made based on the positions of people."
When asked for more information, what university they were affiliated with, and for them to verify their identity by calling or sending an email from an institutional email address, they did not respond.
It now appears fake academic experts in the field may have also been allowed to peer review some of Dr Nazari's work.
Twelve recent retractions in the journal Neural Computing and Applications noted "evidence of peer review manipulation".
"People try and fake everything," said Ivan Oransky, who has spent years researching scientific misconduct on his blog Retraction Watch.
"You see the sock puppet authors where either it's a real person who someone has added to the paper, maybe they're hoping they don't notice," Dr Oransky said.
"Other times they create entire personas, so that those people, these fake people, the sock puppets, can then cite their work."
Two publications by Dr Nazari and Riahi also listed a former Swinburne engineering student as a co-author.
When contacted by the ABC, the former student said he had never spoken to or communicated with anyone by the name of Shadi Riahi and was "really surprised" to hear about problems with Dr Nazari's work.
"He's a nice guy, really funny. I miss him actually," the former student said, adding they had not spoken in six years.
Another Australian academic under a cloud
The ABC can reveal another construction engineering academic who worked at an Australian university has also had several articles retracted.
Ehsan Mohseni, who was employed by the University of Newcastle, co-authored seven papers that have been retracted over the past 18 months for manipulation and duplication of data.
Artemisia Stricta alleges Dr Mohseni is part of a group who have falsified results, duplicated the work of other research groups and self-plagiarised.
The whistleblower found similarities in x-ray graphs of concrete between a paper published by Dr Nazari and "Shadi Riahi" in 2011 and Dr Mohseni and others in 2019.
Dr Mohseni did not respond to multiple requests for comment but another researcher who co-authored the paper said that the article was self-retracted.
"We really didn't know what has happened and why they are so similar," the researcher said.
"We think it might have been a laboratory mistake. The editors gave us time to explain what has happened but it looked like they weren't convinced."
The academic, who did not want to be named, said they believed none of the errors would have been picked up had it not been for the whistleblower.
"We are not sure why the person is doing this. Maybe it's a problem between him and Dr Nazari? But this is just too much.
"They are putting the microscope on everything we have done. We definitely have done mistakes because of lack of experience, we are young researchers, but I think it is unfair.
"All researchers are under so much pressure to publish papers because any progress at work at the moment is based on how many publications you've got and the connections you've got," the researcher told the ABC.
In a statement, the University of Newcastle's pro vice-chancellor (research and innovation) Brian Kelly said Dr Mohseni was no longer an employee of the university.
"The academic papers in question concern work undertaken while Dr Mohseni was employed at another university and pre-date his employment with the University of Newcastle," Professor Kelly said.
Nazari joins the ranks of the world's most disgraced researchers
The retraction count for Nazari, whose whereabouts are unknown, has been increasing by the week.
Only three scientists in history have now had more papers retracted, according to Ivan Oransky's blog Retraction Watch.
"He is well ahead now of someone who's quite famous for his misconduct, who is Diederik Stapel, who's a former social psychology researcher in the Netherlands," Dr Oransky said.
Dr Stapel famously admitted to having fabricated data in experiments for 58 psychology papers, telling The New York Times that he was led to concoct results because he was "frustrated by the messiness of experimental data".
"It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth," Dr Stapel told the Times in 2013.
The Dutch psychologist was only caught after three junior researchers who suspected he was faking data reported him to the university.
"There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition," Dr Stapel explained to the Times.
That scarcity of resources, and the pressure for academics to regularly publish in order to secure further funding, could be one reason why an increasing number of researchers have been caught cheating in recent years.
Another is a proliferation of online sleuths trying to hold researchers to account.
Dr Oransky said the number of retractions had increased exponentially. In 2000 there were 40. In 2020 there were over 2,500 retractions.
"Forty to 2,500, is, you know, 60-fold growth. That, to me, is almost exclusively about the sleuths [rather] than … about more scrutiny of papers.
"They are people who are not just pedants, but very focused and interested in what they're doing. They're obsessed, you know, in a positive sense."
The price of bad science
The motivation, according to whistleblower Artemisia Stricta, is the public good.
"We all pay the price when the institutions that are supposed to protect the integrity of the scientific process fall asleep at the wheel.
"The erosion of public trust in science gives rise to movements such as anti-vaccination and climate scepticism," they said.
"On the other hand, people who do rely on science may be basing crucial private and public decisions on incorrect information. The long-term impacts of a compromised scientific process may be catastrophic," the whistleblower said.
History shows dodgy research often festers in the public domain and can be cited, republished and accepted as fact for decades before it's eventually debunked.
It took 12 years for an erroneous study falsely linking autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine by disgraced scientist Andrew Wakefield to be formally retracted by The Lancet.
That was thanks in no small part to the work of investigative journalist Brian Deer, who discovered Dr Wakefield had multiple undisclosed conflicts of interest and that the study of just 12 children had been rigged.
But the damage had already been done.
Vaccination rates in the United Kingdom hit a low of 80 per cent in the early 2000s, leaving children unprotected from serious diseases. The repercussions are still being felt today, with Dr Wakefield being hailed as a hero by vaccine sceptics.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, questionable and later retracted research has continued to fuel vaccine hesitancy and promote dubious treatments like ivermectin to an anxious public desperate for a cure.
Errors in research in the field of construction materials can also be linked to real-world consequences.
"We had a catastrophic collapse here in Florida not too long ago," Ivan Oransky told the ABC via Skype from his New York office.
"Every five years, they're obligated in New York City to actually look at the concrete … and inspect it all."
"All of that is based on science, it's based on what engineers and material scientists have been publishing over the years."
"Well, if that's wrong, then the building collapses or a bridge collapses or something else awful happens."
"This is not just purely academic. It has real-life consequences," Dr Oransky said.
Another real-world consequence is the waste of public funds.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) confirmed Dr Nazari received a prestigious $652,000 Future Fellowship in 2017 to look at geopolymer concrete and was listed as a joint chief investigator in another $442,000 Discovery Projects grant which is continuing to be funded.
The ARC said in a statement it was, "unable to provide information regarding research integrity issues that are a matter between the ARC and institutions".
Swinburne first investigated Dr Nazari's work at the university in May 2018 but he continued to work there until a series of 30 retractions became public in October 2019.
In a statement, the university said funding provided to Dr Nazari while employed by Swinburne was returned to the ARC.
A spokesperson added: "Swinburne takes allegations of potential misconduct seriously and investigates these allegations.
"Dr Nazari left Swinburne in October 2019 and is no longer involved with Swinburne in any way."
Australia lacks watchdog for research integrity
The only case of Australian academics being held criminally responsible for falsifying research occurred on the sandstone campus of the University of Queensland.
Researchers Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood had four papers retracted between them and were given suspended jail sentences after an investigation by the state's Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC).
The CCC had jurisdiction to investigate because Murdoch and Barwood were found to have financially benefited from state-funded grants awarded off the back of fake research.
One study into Parkinson's disease published in the European Journal of Neurology was retracted after the university's investigation found "no primary data can be located and no evidence has been found that the study described in the article was conducted".
In November last year, a leading Queensland cancer researcher was also referred by his institution to the state's CCC after an external investigation found he "seriously breached codes relating to responsible research conduct". The CCC has yet to publicly comment on the matter.
While criminal convictions are vanishingly rare in Australia, the whistleblower in the Ali Nazari case believes an investigation by an external body is warranted.
David Vaux, an expert on academic integrity from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, said Australia needed an independent body to deal with complaints about scientific misconduct.
"I believe that if somebody is accepting, you know, large amounts of public funding on false pretences, then that's financial fraud. And that should be a criminal matter," Professor Vaux said.
"If someone gets an ARC grant, and then it's found that they didn't really conduct the research, or their application was based on fake research … who, in Australia, can investigate that kind of thing, logistically?" he asked.
Despite more than $11 billion dollars being spent by the federal government on research and development each year, there isn't an independent body designated to investigate allegations of misconduct.
"Australia is one of the only countries in the world that doesn't have a national office for research integrity. You know, 20 European countries do. The US does, Canada, Japan, even China," Professor Vaux said.
"Australia has a national office for integrity in sports, but we don't have one for integrity in research".
Bad science spreads 'like a weed'
After watching thousands of retractions come through over the years, Dr Oransky doesn't see himself running out of things to write about any time soon.
"Bad science — and this is even the retracted versions of it — it definitely proliferates."
"It's, you know, it's like a weed. This is a big problem," he said.
The whistleblower behind the Ali Nazari investigation believes there are hundreds more papers that should be retracted and more scientists implicated in just the one field.
"Nazari's fraud is despicable, but it could not have been so damaging but for the complicity of the university/publishers/journals, which stonewalled my reports of misconduct (sometimes for years)," Artemisia Stricta said.
"Quite simply, no-one wants to retract papers … even when the evidence to justify it is overwhelming."
Artemisia Stricta vowed they would not be deterred by threats.
"For as long as I continue to find scientific fraud, I will continue to report it," they said.
