Group in China earns nearly a dozen retractions for image duplication, forged authorship, and more

A group of materials scientists in China has earned 11 retractions and three corrections — so far — for image manipulation, duplication, deceptive authorship and other misconduct.

The papers, from a group at the prestigious Tsinghua University, appeared in a variety of materials journals and date back to 2014. The most recent publications arrived in 2016.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The notices read pretty much the same way. Here, for example, is the retraction statement for “Effects of high-energy electro-pulsing treatment on microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion behavior of Ti–6Al–4V alloy,” which was published in 2015 in Materials Science and Engineering C, an Elsevier title:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor.

Figure 5 duplicates figure 8 of the article that had already appeared in Materials Characterization 98 (2014) 147–161, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matchar.2014.10.026, figure 12 of the paper that had appeared in Applied Physics A 117 (2014) 2251-2264, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00339-014-8655-1, as well as panels from figure 12 of the article that had appeared in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds 616 (2014) 173–183, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jallcom.2014.07.143.

Figure 6 duplicates figure 9 of the article that had already appeared in Materials Characterization 98 (2014) 147–161, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matchar.2014.10.026 and figure 13 of the article that had appeared in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds 616 (2014) 173–183, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jallcom.2014.07.143.

Figure 7 duplicates figure 10 of the article that had already appeared in Surface & Coatings Technology 258 (2014) 467–484, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.surfcoat.2014.08.052.

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

Journal records indicate that confirmation of the submission and publication of the article was sent to the first author’s email address, in addition to an email that used the corresponding author’s name ([email protected]).

The corresponding author and the first author wish to mention that the co-author Zion T.H. Tse was not involved in the preparation and handling of this article. He was not informed about the publication and he did not grant the use of his name and affiliation in the publication.

Prof. S. Petter Lyngstadaas, Dr. Hanna Tiainen and Dr. Sebastian Geissler from University of Oslo are acknowledged for the considerable effort put into collecting the evidence and reporting this case of multiple publication.)

Guoyi Tang’s name appears on all of the articles in question, which have been cited as often as 21 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

‘An easy but very multifaceted case’

So how were these problems spotted?

Tiainen, one of the people credited with figuring out what went wrong, tells Retraction Watch that

…this was an easy but very multifaceted case of scientific misconduct that turned out into quite a complicated investigation by the journals and publishers involved in the case.

It all started, said Tiainen,

when we received persistent requests from a  reviewer to cite totally irrelevant articles as part of the peer review process for our own paper. It was quite obvious that the reviewer in question was just fishing for citations for their latest publications (not the first and certainly not the last time this has happened) but this time the reviewer was so pushy that I decided to have a bit closer look on the papers the reviewer was pressuring us to cite.

Tiainen realized that

two of the papers contained identical results and with a bit more digging, I found in total 16 published papers (thanks to excessive self-citing by the authors) that kept recycling the same results but with rearranged and slightly reedited figure panels…

Tiainen and colleagues reported the problems to the editors of the relevant journals.

There are still [a] few of these papers with serious issues (same images used in different papers describing entirely different materials, identical images depicting different samples) that have not yet been retracted.

Tse is an engineer at the University of Georgia, where he works on advanced medical devices.

An email to author Tang received no reply, as did one to the dean of the college of engineering at Tsinghua. [See comments below.] According to this biographical sketch for a paper he presented at a 2016 conference, Tang

is professor of materials science, Advanced Materials Institute of Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, where he teaches courses in materials science frontier and engineering materials: performance, selection and design. He accumulated years of research experience when working as a visiting professor in Stuttgart University and Max-Planck Institute, Germany, University of Alaska Fairbanks and North Carolina State University, USA, and Nanyang Technology University, Singapore. His recent research interests focus on electroplastic processing technology, phase change materials, biomass and bio-degradable polymer composites, and etc. He has published more than 120 scientific papers and obtained 35 Chinese patents.

Oh, and the paper he presented? It has been retracted:

This article has been retracted as it plagiarizes part of the text that appeared in the article published by J.K. Park et al in Advanced Materials, 22 (2010) 4857–4861, 10.1002/adma.201002255.One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. As such this article represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.Journal records indicate that confirmation of the submission and publication of the article was sent to the first author’s email address, in addition to an email that used the corresponding author’s name ([email protected]).The corresponding author and the first author wish to mention that the co-author Zion T.H. Tse was not involved in the preparation and handling of this article. He was not informed about the publication or granted the use of his name and affiliation in the publication.

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