Paper Mill behind the Unusual Case where PRC Authors Called Taiwan "Republic of China"
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 [1] with no Taiwan authors were listed.
The article [1] was co-authored by Shunyu Yao with Nanchang University (People's Republic of China, PRC), Yipeng Xu with Tiangong University (PRC), and Ehsan Ramezani with Amir Kabir University of Technology (Iran).
Authors from the PRC seldom call Taiwan "Republic of China" (RoC), because the PRC government and their people consider Taiwan a part of their country instead of another China. On the articles published on Elsevier with PRC authors and without Taiwan authors, Taiwan was never called RoC, except the article [1].
And authors from other nations, except for those having strong political relationship to Taiwan, usually do not call Taiwan "Republic of China", either. Iran has stronger political relationship to PRC than Taiwan, the Iranian authors may prefer Taiwan instead of RoC.
Indeed, on this article [1], the authors called the name "Taiwan" for most of the time, expect for 4 times, they called Taiwan "Republic of China". The 5GH Team has no details about why the authors did so, but the team also concerns about the coauthorship of this article and the others.
Until recently, Ehsan Ramezani, the third author of the article [1], has published 3 academic articles, according his Google Scholar profile [2]. All these 3 articles [1, 3-4] were published on "Energy Reports", an Elsevier title, and submitted within a short period between August, 2020 and January, 2021. Except for Ehsan Ramezani, these articles have no author in common, and all the co-authors were from China, thousands of kilo-meters away from Iran, raising concerns about their "cooperations".
Concerns on other issues about these articles [1, 3-4] were also raised. A PubPeer post [5] suggests that the article [1] cited several irrelevant references, and it also earned several irrelevant citations from other articles. Besides, the 5GH Team found some tortured phrases, like "climate alteration" and others, on the article [3]. Either the irrelevant citations or the tortured phrases are indicators of paper-mill articles.
The publications by Yipeng Xu, the second author of the article [1], are also problematic. According to the ResearchGate records, Yipeng Xu has published 25 articles until recently. Most of them were published in 2021 (14) and 2022 (9), one article was published in 2020, and one other was published in 2023. No further publications by XU after 2023 were found. Please find Reference [6] for details about these publications.
Most of these articles were co-authored by "researchers" from both PRC and other nation(s), mostly Iran, Saudi Arabia and other West Asia countries. The co-authors were affiliated to different universities across the main land of PRC, including top university, like Sun Yat-Sen University and others. Most of these co-authors cooperated with XU for only ONE time, with handful of them were listed on multiple articles. For some articles, authors from more than 4 distinct institutions were listed.
Yipeng Xu was affiliated to three institutions on the above-mentioned articles, namely, Tiangong University, Chongqing Technology and Business University, as well as Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology. But the 5GH Team found no information about XU on the websites of these universities, nor did the team find information about Chen She with Tiangong University, a "core author" of the Xu's articles, suggesting neither Xu nor She was a leader of a researcher group. Therefore, their cooperations with huge number of international authors during a short period are questionable, and these cooperations may be indicators of paper mill.
On one article [7] of Xu's publications, a fictitious author Dragan Rodriguez with Case Western Reserve University was listed. Several articles, including [8] and others, by Rodriguez were retracted due to Authorship-for-Sale and other issues.
With these reasons, the 5GH team believes a paper mill behind this matter, and it likely targeted an Elsevier title "Energy Reports". 10 of 25 articles by Xu were published on this Elsevier journal. And the team is asking for any input about identities for Xu and She.
Reference
[1] 10.1016/j.egyr.2020.12.034
[2] Ehsan Ramezani's Google Scholar Profile
[3] 10.1016/j.egyr.2020.11.168
[4] 10.1016/j.egyr.2021.04.058
[5] A PubPeer Post on Article [1]
