A Group of Authors Massively Reused Spectra and Images on 26 Articles
Recently, the 5GH team found that 26 articles massively reuse spectra and images, and 5 other articles have questionable (hand-draw style) spectra. These 31 articles have one common name, Nezamaddin Mengelizadeh with Larestan University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The articles were published between 2018 and 2025, and most targeted "Desalination and Water Treatment", an Elsevier title, and "Environmental Science and Pollution Research", a Springer Nature title. Please find the Supporting Information for more details.
Reference
[1] Supporting Information
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.
We urge Springer Nature, the publisher of the journal, to keep eyes on the editors.
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.
Up to recently, Springer Nature have retracted 59 articles due to "irregularities with respect to submission, authorship, and peer review", "irregularities with respect to submission and authorship", "irregularities in authorship during the submission process" and other similar reasons. 58% (34/59) of them have zero self-citation, suggesting that "ZERO self-citation" may be an indicator for problematic articles.
Concerns are raised regarding to sampling bias in some BYHEALTH-funded studies and other studies BYHEALTH took part in. The 5GH team, who investigated this matter, warns the scientific community and the public to pay more cautions in interpreting the outcomes of those studies.
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”).
