Director of the Public Institution "Secondary Medical School Podgorica" Kristina Radoman She received her doctorate from the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the University of Kragujevac, and the circumstances under which she obtained that title raise a number of questions about the transparency and credibility of that procedure, as that faculty has previously been in the public spotlight due to controversial diplomas and doctorates.
Radoman graduated from the Belgrade School of Health Professional Studies and the Faculty of Management, majoring in Health Management, Belgrade. This is stated in the biography available as part of her doctoral dissertation. Her doctorate can be found in the NARDUS Doctorate Register and library records and is registered as a doctoral dissertation from 2018 at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac.
The College of Health Sciences in Belgrade, according to the coordinator of Alternative Montenegro, an organization that has been dealing with the problem of fake diplomas for a long time, Zarije Pavićević, among the schools from which a large number of controversial diplomas in the health sector of Montenegro come.
"According to our information, this school has been considered one of the more problematic places for years when it comes to controversial diplomas in the health sector. These are not isolated cases, but a serious phenomenon, because a large number of head nurses and medical technicians in Montenegro graduated from this school," Pavićević told Center for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro (CIN-CG).
He points out that this makes it more necessary to thoroughly check all diplomas obtained at that address.
"Especially when it comes to people who today hold responsible positions in the healthcare and education systems."
CIN-CG was unable to determine which institution is behind the statement in her biography that after graduating from the Radoman College of Health Sciences, she graduated from the “Faculty of Management, majoring in healthcare management in Belgrade.” Publicly available data shows that there is or was a “healthcare management” study program in Belgrade at several institutions, including the Faculty of Organizational Sciences (FON), the Faculty of Medicine, ICEPS, as well as some controversial educational institutions such as the Academy of Professional Studies and Singidunum University, as well as some colleges, but there is no data on a Faculty of Management under that name that has a major in “healthcare management.”
Inconsistencies, fake diplomas and doctorates
In her official biography, which is available on the official website of the Public Institution “Secondary Medical School Podgorica”, Radoman does not state where she studied before earning her doctorate, but only where she defended her doctoral thesis - at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, majoring in preventive medicine. The topic of the thesis was “The influence of a diet enriched with Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids on myocardial function and oxidative-inflammatory parameters in the hearts of old rats”.
In August 2022, a few years after Radoman received her doctorate, the former rector of the University of Kragujevac Nebojsa Arsenijevic and Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences Predrag Canovic were arrested and taken to Kraljevo on the orders of the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime, on suspicion of abuse of office and fraud in connection with the issuance of diplomas, which, according to local media, resulted in a multi-million-shilling profit. Arsenijević was charged with trading in influence, and Čanović with abuse of office, and the charges related to the fact that they illegally enrolled foreign citizens and issued them with forged diplomas and even doctoral dissertations. This case led to doubts about the regularity of the work of certain structures at the University of Kragujevac and raised questions about the control of academic procedures at that institution.
Radoman completed her internship at the Health Center in Podgorica. Her biography also states that she has been employed as a teacher at the Public Institution "Secondary Medical School" in Podgorica since 2011, where she teaches the professional-medical group of subjects, and that she was the acting director at that school, and that she has been performing the function of director since the end of January 2022. Radoman is also a teaching associate at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montenegro (UCG) in the study program College of Medicine, as well as at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the UCG, and is also the winner of the award for the best teacher from the Quality and Talents Fund.
There are some illogicalities in Kristina Radoman's doctoral thesis. On the title page and identification page of the thesis, the mentor is listed as doc. dr. Vladimir Zivkovic, while in the English part a completely different name appears as the mentor, a professor Lukas Rasulić. In addition, the field for the date of dissertation defense was left blank. The official lecturer's biography on the website of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montenegro states that Radoman received her doctorate on January 19, 2018.
The bibliography of her dissertation also lists her scientific paper with several co-authors entitled “Differences between α-linolenic and linoleic acid supplementation on the redox status and cardiodynamic parameters of male and female Wistar albino rats”, which was published in the journal Archives of Biological Sciences in October 2017.
According to the regulations of the Faculty of Medical Sciences in Kragujevac, to apply for a doctoral dissertation topic, the candidate must have a published paper in extenso as the first author, while for the defense, they must have at least three published papers, at least one of which is on the dissertation topic and published in a journal with an impact factor on the SCI list.
The director is silent.
CIN-CG asked Radoman several questions about her education and doctoral dissertation. We asked her to specify where and when she completed her undergraduate and master's studies, as well as to explain discrepancies in the dissertation itself regarding her mentor and the omitted date of defense. We also asked her whether the work had passed a formal originality check, which parts of the doctoral dissertation had been previously published in a scientific article on a related topic, and how she would comment on the fact that she received her doctorate from a university that has been in the public spotlight in recent years due to scandals related to diplomas and doctoral degrees.
Even after more than two weeks of waiting, Radoman did not respond.
Radoman also has an unusually wide list of professional papers, from medicine, to sports, to banking.
In her biography, Radoman points out: "She participated in several international and regional scientific conferences and published about twenty papers in domestic and foreign professional journals, five of which are on the SCI list."
The SCI list is a colloquial name for journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), one of the main indexes of the Web of Science database, one of the most important international databases used to monitor the quality, visibility, and citations of scientific journals.
According to data available in the Web of Science database, Radoman has seven scientific papers indexed in the Core Collection, and among these papers are two papers published in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry published by Springer, a paper in the journal BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, published within Springer Nature/BMC, a paper in the journal Children published by MDPI, as well as a paper in the International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research, a journal indexed in relevant international databases.
The website of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montenegro, where Radoman teaches, lists all the other places where she has published her works, and it can be seen that these are very different types of publications, whose academic reputation and reach are not at the same level - from established and indexed scientific journals, such as Archives of Biological Sciences, Serbian Journal of Experimental and Clinical Research and Central European Journal of Public Health, to some regional journals and conference proceedings.
A look at the list of works that Kristina Radoman listed in her biography shows an unusually wide and thematically unrelated range of fields in which she appears as an author or co-author, from physiology, nutrition and sports medicine, through public health and toxicology, to sustainable development, thermal comfort, hydrogen, electronic cards, and even electronic banking. Such versatility, in itself, does not have to be controversial, but it raises the question of the actual scope and character of her scientific contribution in such diverse fields.
Most of the publications mentioned in Radoman's biography on the website of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montenegro in which she published her works are not indexed in the Web of Science database.
It is interesting, among other things, that in 2015, together with co-authors, she published the paper "Engineering providing sustainable development" in the publication Applied Mechanics and Materials.
Applied Mechanics and Materials is a professional publication in the field of engineering and applied technical sciences. Although it was included in Scopus, one of the most famous international bibliographic and citation databases used to monitor scientific journals, papers, and citations of researchers, the publication was removed from the database in 2014, citing “publication concerns,” meaning that concerns had arisen regarding the journal's publishing or editorial practices, or publication standards.
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