Abnormal Data on Articles with Authors from China Resources Snow Breweries

Recently, the 5GH team found 4 articles with author(s) from China Resources Snow Breweries Co. Ltd. (华润雪花啤酒有限公司) have abnormal data and/or error bars.

Abnormal error bars were found on several figures of article [1-2]. Some of those error bars were shifted rightward to the data points, suggesting they may be manually added instead of generated with the plotting software. It can be observed that some of those error bars are asymmetric, namely, the lengths of the upper part and the lower part are not equal to each other, and some lose the lower part.

Abnormal patterns of the data is observed on Table 2 of the article [3]. Most of the mean values at the TFC entries have fractional parts of either ".93" or ".27", while the mean values at the BGC entries have trailing digits exclusively to be ".70", ".20", or ".45". These abnormal patterns suggest that the data was fabricated or that the measurements were not properly set up.

Meanwhile, unusual over representation of ".7292", ".9306", ".9931", ".7629", ".2639" and ".4097" is observed from the data on the Table 2 of the article [4].

All these 4 articles have author(s) from a top Chinese alcoholic beverage manufacturers, China Resources Snow Breweries Co. Ltd. (华润雪花啤酒有限公司).

The 5GH team also noticed that an author, named Ran Qiu, from this company published 6 articles in 2024. Most of those articles (5 of 6) were co-authored with authors from Sichuan, and Qiu was the only author from the company. Although Qiu is the leader of a laboratory at the company, he did not publish any academic article before 2024, and he seems not to be a senior scientist. The 5GH team has no details about the role of Qiu in those studies, but it is likely that he payed for the authorship.

In recent years, some commercial companies in China were found to get involved in paper mill, authorship-for-sale, and other academic misconducts. And some others were found to get involved in low quality studies [5]. These practices may also bring ricks to the scientific community.



Reference

[1] 10.1002/j.2050-0416.2011.tb00508.x

[2] 10.1016/j.fm.2018.03.014

[3] 10.1016/j.fochx.2024.101193

[4] 10.1016/j.fochx.2024.101673

[5] 5GH-WuGH-2025.000005






Author: WU Guangheng

Founder and Chair of the 5GH Foundation

E-Mail: wu@5gh.org.cn

Document ID: 5GH-WuGH-2025.000024

Publication Date: 2025.02.02

This article is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License

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