For the past 20 years, an Egyptian researcher based in Saudi Arabia has been publishing papers on various topics related to fossil algae using the same plagiarized pictures over and over again, an article in the current issue of Revista Espanola de Micropaleontologia claims.

Julio Aguirre, from the University of Granada, alleges that Mostafa Mansour Imam has "repeatedly been plagiarizing pictures of diverse organisms previously published by other authors" in papers on microfacies, foraminifers, and coralline red algae from Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene sediments of several areas of Egypt and Libya.

"Imam has been using the same pictures in the different papers that he has published concerning different areas and rocks of different ages," Aguirre said.

Aguirre was alerted to the pattern while reviewing a paper submitted by Imam to the journal. The manuscript dealt with red algae from the Miocene in Egypt, but contained two pictures that in fact showed Pliocene algae from Cádiz in Southern Spain, which had been published by Aguirre in 1993. Another was a picture of an alga from the Miocene of the Vienna basin, also published by Aguirrre in 1996.

After reading the paper, Aguirre and his colleague, Juan Braga, looked back through published papers by Imam "to find that many of the microphotographs illustrating coralline algae from diverse localities and ages in these papers are microphotos of algae from different other regions and ages published by several other authors," the two Spaniards wrote in an E-mail in the paleontological Web forum Calcalga, on February 24, 2004.

"We want to warn the community of paleontologists about all this," they wrote. "The information provided in Imam's papers should be disregarded, and care should be taken when reviewing manuscripts by him." Aguirre said that Imam's manuscript contained at least 14 pictures copied from other papers.

The situation has implications far beyond the research into corallines or in dasyclads, Aguirre told The Scientist. "It also affects researchers working on the regional geology of North West Africa [since] Imam has established the timing of sediments cropping out in different places of North West Africa, and interpreted the paleoenvironmental settings based on microfacies and calcareous algal assemblages."

Repeated attempts to contact Imam were unsuccessful and he did not reply to telephone calls and E-mails from The Scientist regarding the allegations. He is based in the College of Education for Girls in Al Madinah Monawara in Saudi Arabia.

Isabel Rábano, editor-in-chief of Revista Espanola de Micropaleontologia, told The Scientist that when the fraud was detected, she wrote to Imam to let him know that his manuscript was being rejected and that the journal would accept no more papers from him. Rábano has had no response from Imam.

As for how the fraud went undetected for so long, Rábano said, "It's hard to find an appropriate reviewer when dealing with a highly specialized topic. We were lucky here."

She also pointed out that the prestigious German journal Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, where Imam published at least three papers, had been "unable to detect the fraud."

Correction (posted September 24): When originally posted, this story said that Mostafa Mansour Imam was Saudi Arabian. The Scientist regrets the error.