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Large chunks of text, figures, and tables in a 2009 paper co-authored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, are identical to those of a 2002 paper published by South Korean researchers, Nature has learned. Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry office which ran the disputed presidential elections in June, which returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Daneshjou is also a former governor general of Tehran.

The paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran is entitled "Analysis of critical ricochet angle using two space discretization methods", and was published in the journal Engineering with Computers in 2009. In many places the text duplicates verbatim that of an earlier paper: "Ricochet of a tungsten heavy alloy long-rod projectile from deformable steel plates", published by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics in 2002.

Other sentences in Daneshjou's paper are identical to those in a paper given by other researchers at a 2003 conference.

The scientific credentials of Daneshjou, who was appointed as science minister... >>>