
Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.
The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.
One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.
Continue reading Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions