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...
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