Recently, the 5GH team found 3 academic papers with manipulated figure(s). All these papers were co-authored by the founder(s) of the Wuhan Hudiandian Technology Co., Ltd. (武汉胡电电科技有限公司), HU Shengnan (胡胜男), and/or LI Mengying (李梦颖). Further investigation suggests the Hudiandian company or its founder(s) sold the data, which was part of HU’s and LI’s researches at Hubei University when they were postgraduate students under the supervision of Dr. WU Huimin (吴慧敏). The 5GH team would like to name this paper mill as “Hudiandian Paper Mill” (“胡电电论文工厂”).
A current investigation by the 5GH team reveals that on the journal "Material Chemistry and Physics", 40% articles with coauthors from China and Iran have unreliable data issues. The team investigated 34 papers obtained on October 3rd, 2024, using a searching strategy of "Journal or Book Title: Materials Chemistry and Physics, Author Affiliation: China and Iran" on ScienceDirect website, and discovered the above-mentioned outcomes.
Jalil Manafian, an author from Iran, published 7 articles on Scientific Reports in 2024. All of them have fishy authorship patterns: (1) Chinese authors were listed as first authors for the articles, the 8 Chinese authors (one as the second author) were from 8 different institutions; (2) the others authors for each article were from multiple nations in West and South Asia, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and others. The widespread cooperations between these authors suggesting the articles potentially originated from paper mill, although the 5GH team has no details whether Manfian is running this paper mill.
These cases demonstrate that the Clarivate profiles are unreliable to be used as a index to judge the academic outcomes for the researchers. The 5GH team urges Clarivate to fix this problem.
It is a list of authorship-for-sale offering, collected by the 5GH Foundation with help from individuals and teams all over the word. We are publishing this list, asking for any clue about the publications of these articles. If you find any information about the publication of any article on this list, please contact us at 5GH@5gh.org.cn, or the publishers/journals.
YAN Yuying, a professor affiliated to both the University of Nottingham, UK, and the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, earned 11 authorships in 2024, with his contribution of “Writing – review & editing”. An investigation by the 5GH team reveals.
Researchers with academic misconduct records are listed. The cases of these academic misconducts were investigated by the 5GH team and our allies. If you (1) want to propose some other misconduct researchers, and/or (2) have comments on the researchers listed, please contact us at: 5GH@5gh.org.cn
Concerns are raised that XIN guest-edited the special issue to promote the publication from IARRP. But it may be another reason: XIN was not able to recruit enough articles, so that her friends in IARRP "helped" her. Or it may be other reasons we do not know yet. But the scientific community wants an answer to this question.
CHEN Jianmin, a professor at Fudan University and a fellow of Acadamia Europaea, is currently accused to get involved in questionable editorial practices. The investigation by the 5GH team revealed that he got involved in 44 cases of unethical practices, including 2 cases of Edit-for-Themself and 42 cases of Edit-for-Pal, all of these editorial practices were given to the articles on “Science of the Total Environment”, an Elsevier title.
In the meantime, high proportions (in some years, the number reached about 1/30) of these papers form Chinese vocational colleges were retracted due to academic misconduct, including but not limited to plagiarism, manipulated peer revies, as well as authorship-for-sale.
Previously, the 5GH team and our international allies exposed some questionable editorial contributions of WANG Aijie as Editor-in-Chief on Environmental Research, an Elsevier title. As the investigation went on, we found more concerning editorial activities from Wang, a professor at Harbin Institute of Technology and CAS Research Center for Eco-Environmental Science, and she was also a winner for the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, China. Here, we update the list for her questionable editorial contributions.
We urge Springer Nature, the publisher of the journal, to keep eyes on the editors.
Nowadays, the name "Republic of China" is not widely used to refer to Taiwan in academic articles, except for the those by Taiwan authors. However, the name was found 4 times on an article with no Taiwan authors were listed.
Recently, the 5GH team and independent investigator(s) examined Santosh's papers on Geoscience Frontiers (GEOSCI FRONT), Gondwana Research (GONDWANA RES), Geosystems and Geoenvironment (GEO GEO), Geological Journal (GEOL J) from 2020 to recently, and found 65% (99/152) of the pepers wih authore-editor conflict.
The 5GH team found that a Xiaohongshu account (ID: 1132185804) registered in Malaysia was selling authorship of academic papers