A paper that made the rounds last year for its blatantly “irrelevant” citations has now been retracted.
Elsevier’s International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published “Origin of the distinct site occupations of H atom in hcp Ti and Zr/Hf” in November 2024.
Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” One of the authors told us they included the references as a “joke” after reviewers pressured them.
All 13 of the references include Sergei Trukhanov as an author, and all but one also includes Alex Trukhanov.
According to his most recent paper, Alex Trukhanov is affiliated with the Scientific-Practical Materials Research Centre of NAS of Belarus in Minsk. Sergei Trukhanov is listed as a researcher at the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow on his most recent paper. Neither responded to our request for comment.
According to the retraction notice, “the authors were requested by two of the reviewers to insert redundant references. The peer review process is deemed to have been compromised.” The notice also states the reviewers responsible for the citation prompting have been removed from the “journal database, so that they cannot review papers in the future.”
Qing-Miao Hu, one of the corresponding authors of the paper and a professor at the Institute of Metal Research Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang, told us in an email he did not want to speculate who the reviewers were. “There are quite a few such kind of reviewers, and the authors suffer from them a lot in recent years,” Hu added.
Hu said the reviewers asked the researchers to add the citations during their second round of edits. He said the phrasing was “to make a joke with the reviewers,” and that they didn’t expect the manuscript “with such a statement” to be accepted for publication. “We were annoyed but did not felt [sic] pressured to add the citation,” Hu said.
A spokesperson for Elsevier told us they were “currently investigating this matter and cannot comment on open investigations.”
The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy has appeared in Retraction Watch before. In 2023, we reported the journal was one of a handful that published papers by an apparently nonexistent author. In 2017, the journal retracted several papers over fake peer reviews.
The authors have already resubmitted the paper to the same journal, Hu said, and agreed with the retraction “because it was indeed published without a normal peer review.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
I mean who among us has not wanted to put something like this in their paper after a particular comment from a reviewer? I’m just impressed they actually got it approved
Was the associate editor/handling editor sleeping? It was his/her job to ensure that these irrelevant references don’t get cited at the first place!
That’s great! No one penalized except for the authors.
Indeed. I’d argue the paper should have been preserved as a warning about the ethical and professional lapses of some reviewers. Of course, a better option would have been to raise the issue in the response letter; any sensible editor should have agreed about the reviewer’s lapses.
By any set of standards which was valid 15 years ago, IJHE would be deemed predatory, and we would just say that the authors got punished for publishing in a predatory outlet.
The authors try to call out the reviewer’s bad-faith behaviour and their reward is the paper getting retracted 🙄
It’s quite funny. What bothers me is that this joke is proof that no one bothered to read the paper before publishing. If it was otherwise, then authors would be forced to remove the joke.
The authors are expected to provide a clear and well-reasoned rebuttal to the reviewer’s request, demonstrating why the suggested references are not relevant to the scope or focus of the study. Conversely, it is the responsibility of the handling editor to carefully evaluate such rebuttals—if presented—and to make an informed decision accordingly.