An IEEE TGRS Reviewer Asked Student to Review Article in His Name

Recently, we read a post on the Chinese social media RedNote, also named Xiaohongshu, that a reviewer (referred to as A) of "IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing" asked his student (referred to as B) to review an article in A's name, which may violate the journal's policy.

Although the 5GH team has no details about the name of A, we have some cues: (1) The student B claimed in his post that he (the student B) also received an invitation from the journal to review the SAME article. And (2) the family name of the student B is "Liu" according to the screenshot of the invitation letter.

The 5GH team is asking the journal to open an investigation on this matter.








Author: WU Guangheng

Founder and Chair of the 5GH Foundation

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

Document ID: 5GH-WuGH-2025.000031

Publication Date: 2025.02.13

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

A Paper Mill Is Targeting Scientific Reports, Authors from China and West Asia May Be the Costumers

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.


Sampling Bias in Some BYHEALTH (汤臣倍健) Funded Studies

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.


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.