In today’s episode of Smut Clyde‘s Flying Circus, which is about both Intelligent as well as Fuzzy Systems, you will meet many characters only a scholarly publisher can love – including Pakistan’s (or maybe the world’s?) leading mathematician, Tasawar Hayat, who is never a plagiarist, the Persian self-citation champion Mohsen Sheikholeslami, and our favourite toxic polluter from China, Xiangke Wang. Somehow they are all connected, or so Smut Clyde neutrosophically claims.
Fuzzy Sapience
By Smut Clyde
Please admire this Special Issue of Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, from September 2019, on the topic of ‘Fuzzy decision making and applications in knowledge management‘. Guest editor Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang ensured that all submissions were “anonymously reviewed by experts to maintain academic excellence and integrity“. Which is to say, pick any random paper and it turns out to be a macaronic mishmash, in which introductory paragraphs about (say) the place of the Atrium in contemporary architecture are grafted onto conclusions about (say) instability of risk-management in the financial system in China, under the rubric of “construction noise appraisal models”, held together by connective tissue of what one might call the ‘algebra of uncertainty’.
Clearly these Surrealist conceptual chimeras were actually the work of one G.W. Wei or his support staff (generated by them rather than ‘written’, with no time to waste on low-priority concerns like ‘coherence’ or ‘internal consistency’). In essence many are vehicles for delivering payloads of G.Wei citations. As well as his expertise in his specialty of Uncertainty Algebra, Wei is experienced in calculating citations indices such as the H-index (currently Hi=77). The discovery that Guiwu Wei and guest-editor Juopeng Zhang are regular collaborators came as no great surprise.
This phenomenon of authors cultivating ‘citation plantations’ to inflate their academic status is not new (even farming out citation-vehicle manuscripts to other authors to publish under their own names) – Luming Zhang for example, or Kuo-Chen Chou, or El-Naschie.
Here it also provides a glimpse of the trade in co-authorship, and allows us to touch on the journals that facilitate the chicanery.
For a pleasant change, these shenanigans have few consequences outside Academia. No post-grad students will waste months trying to replicate experiments and results that only ever existed in Fantasyland. No treatment recommendations for cancer patients will be revised to reflect fictitious ‘breakthroughs’. The research grants diverted to flow down rat-holes will be relatively small. But we must set the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems aside for now, as we have not checked in on Xiangke Wang and Yubing Sun for a while, and it is time to renew their acquaintance.
Xiangke Wang’s artistic metier lies in the composition of X-Ray Diffraction patterns, with a relaxed attitude to the precise subject matter of electron-microscopy images. He is currently mentioned in 88 threads at PubPeer, with 17 retractions, while the figures for Yubing Sun are 36 threads and 16 retractions… 27 papers (12 of them retracted) have both as authors. These figures do not count cite-rich manuscripts that were written for others to sign (e.g. Congcong Ding, Pengfei Zong, Fengbo Li, Ting Yao), for Wang and Sun are farmers in the fields of self-citation and follow the pseudepigraphic tradition.
Those others became the scapegoats when the systematic forgery floated to the surface, while Xiangke Wang’s own reputation and editorial positions were sheltered by his status as “Highly-cited Researcher“. Though rumour has it that he has swapped his erstwhile university for a new affiliation at Shaoxing University plus his own company to cash in on the coming market in bio-char carbon sequestration.
Inquiring minds are intrigued by the presence of Tasawar Hayat and Ahmed Alsaedi among Wang’s regular co-authors and co-retractees. Remember those names for later. Those two also collaborate with Wang’s students (e.g. Changlun Chen) in the absence of the Maestro.
[left] Fig 1B from Zhao et al (2011a); [right] Fig 1B from Zhao et al (2011b) – by Wang and Chen, without Tasawar Hayat, but I like the Creature from the Black Lagoon
Six of those recent Xiangke Wang retractions were from Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, where a new Editor-in-Chief had been inspired to delve into the journal’s back-catalog and shine the light of hindsight upon some 2011-2016 decisions to accept his work. The E-in-C found FTIR spectra recycled from papers farmed out to others (Sun et al 2016 and Yao et al 2016)…
EXAFS spectra that were recycled or just physically irreal (e.g. Yang et al 2013)… combined forms of silly-buggers (Ding et al 2015)… manipulated and recycled XPS spectra (Sun, Li & Wang 2014)…
Recycled, plagiarised molecular-species functions (Yang et al 2011 versus Sheng et al 2011)…
Even old-fashioned copy-paste text plagiarism (Yang et al 2011) – below, left. Sheng et al (2011) in turn drew text as well as Figures from earlier work that they really should have acknowledged – below, right.
A bright future awaits the Editor-in-Chief as an anonymous PubPeer contributor.
Several retractions were initially requested by their first author Shouwei Zhang, who said the quiet part out loud by explaining that images had been created in Photoshop. Other authors, less impetuous, back-pedaled to requesting Corrections that would incorporate “updated experimental data”. At right, Fig 1B from Zhang et al (2014). See also Zhang et al (2013a), Zhang et al (2013b).
Since last appearing in For Better Science, Xiangke Wang and his students have attracted a slow trickle of Corrections and Expressions of Concern from more magnanimous Editors. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, for instance, accepted five (5) corrections for “Removal of Cu(II) and fulvic acid by graphene oxide nanosheets decorated with Fe3O4 nanoparticles” (Li et al 2012) because “erroneous data were used during the figure preparation“. Not unusual for that journal.
Fig 1B remained unchanged (“TEM of … GO/Fe3O4″), although it also appeared as Fig 1B of Yang et al (2012), there depicting TEM of RGO/Fe304 (H/t Thallarca Lechrioleuca).
Figure S3 was corrected because the main result of varying pH was to alter the lighting level between the original figure’s six panels, leaving the image constant. It did not go unnoticed (at least, not by Thallarca Lechrioleuca again) that the same repeated panel also appeared as insets in Fig 3 of Li et al (2014) and Fig 7A of Li et al (2016), depicting quite different nanomaterials congregating out of suspension through their attraction to a magnet.
Hu et al (2016) was untenable because Figure 5c characterised two different materials using the same Raman spectrum, deconvolving it into two different combinations of the same basis functions (i.e. theoretical profiles from specific x-ray resonances). Mere sloppiness in organising one’s data cannot explain this away, but the editors of Nanotechnology happily accepted a replacement. As Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) likes to say, this is like accepting a second urine sample from an athlete to replace a first sample that turned out to contain more PED than urea.
I must content myself with one last example. The editors of Carbon allowed two amendments for Hu et al (2016). The first merely replaced the numerical contents. The second addressed the regrettable Figures 1c and 5a, in which “errors were introduced when preparing the figures and do not affect the discussion or interpretation of the results”.
Many of the Corrections were pre-emptive, unprompted by questions at PubPeer, perhaps to forestall the unwelcome attentions of regular commenter ‘Thallarcha Lechrioleuca‘ who continues to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of papers remain unexamined.
Going back to Tasawar Hayat, he is the leading light of Islamic mathematics. In recognition of his prodigious productivity (~2390 papers, or 2374 in a January 2021 hagiography, or 2435 according to Dimensions) he is garlanded with awards and honours, such as the 2021 Obada Prize (the most prestigious honour to be endowed by Natural Sciences Publishing). It is unclear, however, what he or Ahmed Alsaedi (with only 1942 papers) contributed to those exercises in physical chemistry from Xiagke Wang and Changlun Chen.
Setting aside Hayat in turn, we come to Mohsen Sheikholeslami Kandelousi, a rising star of Magnetohydrodynamics, with 510 papers. Already Sheikholeslami is an authority in his field: reviewing the state of the literature, editing books for Elsevier and other predatory publishers. With unaccustomed frankness the editors of Powder Technology blamed plagiarism for a 2019 retraction of one of his 2014 papers. Delapsus resurgam, though; that embarrassment posed no obstacle to Sheikholeslami’s career, and was outweighed by his continuing accrual of citations. Self-citation on an architectonic, industrial scale is a factor here: in a typical Sheikholeslami paper, great slabs of self-cites slot into place as in the cyclopean hewn stone of Incan architecture to form a seamless unbroken wall of CV. Journals are evidently fine with this. Here, the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer at left, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy at right, belatedly retracting the same paper twice.
In what is becoming a recurring theme, the recipients of this citational largesse included Tasawar Hayat and Ahmed Alsaedi, reflecting the frequency of their collaborations with Sheikholeslami. Again, it is unclear what they contributed to works in which advanced mathematics play little role. “Numerical simulation of nanofluid forced convection heat transfer improvement in existence of magnetic field using lattice Boltzmann method” (2017, retracted 2020) described a FEM/CVM simulation of magnetic nanoparticle-laden fluid, where convective flow interacts with magnetic forces and boundary conditions… this stuff is decades old, where the limiting factor is the power of one’s computer, and the authors’ innovation was to implement Lattice Boltzmann algorithms in FORTRAN.
We learn from the References that T. Hayat and A. Alsaedi are not the only authorities in the field: the name of M. Sheikholeslami appears in 17 out of 38 citations. As well as seminal contributor and author, Sheikholeslami was also one of two peer-reviewers, only becoming first author at the final stages after the editors had followed his recommendation and accepted the manuscript. Well done International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer! And now, the retraction notice:
“This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief as it appears that the integrity of the peer-review process can no longer be guaranteed. The Publisher detected post publication that one of the two review reports was provided for this article by the author Mohsen Sheikholeslami, whose name was not included in the authorship of the original submission.“
This turns out to be a regular event in Sheikholeslami’s oeuvre. “Free convection of CuO–H2O nanofluid in a curved porous enclosure using mesoscopic approach” (Sheikholeslami & Rokni 2017) was retracted
“as it appears that the integrity of the peer-review process can no longer be guaranteed. The Publisher detected post publication that one of the two review reports was provided for this article by the author Mohsen Sheikholeslami, whose name was not included in the authorship of the original submission by the author Houman B. Rokni.“
Well done International Journal of Hydrogen Energy! This may have been pre-arranged (with Rokni recommending Sheikholeslami as a reviewer), or perhaps coauthorship was coerced as a condition of acceptance. Inquiring minds are wondering whether the domination of the References section by Sheikholeslami’s seminal contributions was part of Rokni’s original manuscript, or another proof-stage alteration. These citations are transactional in nature, so Hayat and Alsaedi feature as well.
Anyway, the saga continues: Sheikholeslami & Rokni had been promptly recycled (in IJHE again) as “Mesoscopic simulation of CuO H2O nanofluid in a porous enclosure with elliptic heat source” (Sheikholeslami & Zeeshan 2017). It was retracted, but as it is custom at IJHE, without a separate retraction notice:
“This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
The article duplicates significant parts of a paper that had already appeared in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 42 (2017) 14942-14949 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2017.04.217. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that the paper has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited.“
After his 2014 paper, Sheikholeslami decided that self-plagiarism is safest. One more example: “Numerical simulation for forced convection flow of MHD CuO-H2O nanofluid inside a cavity by means of LBM” (Sheikholeslami, Hayat, Muhammad & Alsaedi, 2018), retracted in 2020. The self-citations reach new heights of absurdity and approach the accomplishments of Kuo-Chen Chou. The retraction notice went:
“The article duplicates significant parts of a paper that had already appeared in the Journal of Molecular Liquids 249 (2018) 941–948 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molliq.2017.10.099. Also, Figure 2b of the article is similar with Figure 2 of the paper that was published by the first author et al in Physica A 417 (2015) 273–286 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2014.09.053.
Moreover, the references [26]–[58] of this article were not requested by the handling Editors and reviewers and were added during the revision process without notifying the Editor and reviewers.“
In fact the offending Fig 2b has appeared at least six times. How often can a single graphical output be “present results”? All six include the same engarbled legend, wrongly identifying the dots as the Khanafer results when in fact they’re the original “present work” (Khanafer et al only provided outputs in graphic form).
Sheikholeslami copied Khanafer’s results into at least three more papers where “present work” was a different simulation.
Subsequent PubPeer comments noted that Sheikholeslami et al. failed at the first hurdle of basic dimensional analysis, entitling them to the “Not Even Wrong” award for physics / mathematical incompetence.
The Nusselt number defined in Eq. (15) does not appear to be dimensionless, which invalidates the proposed dimensionless correlation in Eq. (17), on the basis of the principle of dimensional homogeneity in physics. However, it is all quite uncertain, as most of the variables (including the capital X and Y used in (15)) are not properly defined anywhere in the work. This does not appear to be a reliable study.
A similarity transformation was introduced in Eq. (9) to attempt to reduce the PDEs (2)-(8), which depend upon and to a set of ODEs (10)-(12) that depend only on the similarity variable . However, (10)-(12) feature the quantities and , both which are defined as functions of per Eq. (15) and statement below Eq. (16).
Ergo, the similarity transformation failed, and Eqs. (10)-(12) as still PDEs in and . However, the dependence is now ignored in the remainder of the work. This is a mathematical error invalidating all the results. It is concluded that this work is erroneous.
But now it’s time to change topic again, this time to the Natural National Science Foundation of China (NNSFC). A weird flex, you might say, but it does close the circle neatly. In 6 July 2021, the NNSFC released a compendium of rulings by its Supervisory Committee on six cases of science misconduct – Case 1 consisting of six papers by Guiwu Wei, usually with Mao Lu (1,3,4,5,6); or with Fuad Alsaadi, Tasawar Hayat and Ahmed Alsaedi (1,2,3,4). In Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems (1,2,3,4), Journal of Intelligent Systems (5) or International Journal of Intelligent Systems (6).
- “Hesitant pythagorean fuzzy hamacher aggregation operators and their application to multiple attribute decision making” (2017) [1]
- “Hesitant bipolar fuzzy aggregation operators in multiple attribute decision making” (2017) [2]
- “Pythagorean 2-tuple linguistic aggregation operators in multiple attribute decision making” (2017) [3]
- “Bipolar 2-tuple linguistic aggregation operators in multiple attribute decision making” (2017) [4]
- “Pythagorean Hesitant Fuzzy Hamacher Aggregation Operators in Multiple-Attribute Decision Making” (2019) [5]
- “Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy Hamacher aggregation operators and their application to multiple attribute decision making” (2018) [6]
Mao Lu denied responsibility for (5) and (6) which were evidently published without his knowledge and are so similar that each was pirated from the other. G.W Wei denied responsibility for (1) to (4), which were likewise foisted upon him by those other fast-tongued rogues, somehow using his email address for correspondence, also to blame for subverting the peer-review process:
“After investigation, the papers 1, 2, 3, and 4 published by Wei Guiwu as the correspondent/first and corresponding author were withdrawn by the journal due to the problem of manipulating peer review. Wei Guiwu stated that he did not publish the above four papers, but received scientific research awards and included these four papers in his 2015 National Natural Science Foundation Project (approval number 71571128) progress report. In addition, the papers 5 and 6 published by Wei Guiwu as the first and corresponding author still have the problem of repeated publication; the papers 1 and 4 published by Lu Mao as the first author were retracted by the journal due to the issue of manipulating peer review. Lu Mao said He has not published the above two papers, but has also received scientific research awards.“
The contribution of Hayat et al to (3) cannot have been overwhelming as the paper was also published with a different co-author as “Pythagorean 2-tuple linguistic power aggregation operators in multiple attribute decision making” (Wei & Gao 2020). To be fair, when someone generates scores of papers a year, it is understandable that errors sometimes occur in the paperwork and a single manuscript is dispatched to more than one journal.
All this stems from what I’ve been calling the Uncertainly Algebra, or applications of Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic if you like. The central insight here is that decision-making is improved when you estimate the reliability of the various sources of information that are available to weigh the options. Of course the improvement is no better than the quality of those reliability estimates (I estimated a dog and it ate my Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic homework). So much as a holy relic in the Medieval era would be encased within silver and jewels, the process is enshrined within an edifice of fuzzy sets and partial set membership… scalar values become vectors of Truthiness and Falsehood functions, with aggregation operators to manipulate and combine them… until the underlying subjectivity is lost within the legerdemain, while that original, straightforward insight becomes a more impressive deal.
Prolific PubPeer commenter ‘Rhipidura Albiventris‘ has criticised much of this work for lapses of definitional completeness, monotonicity, and internal coherence. The name of Guiwu Wei occurs frequently in Rhipidura’s corpus of critique, standing astride the fuzzy-set field like a colossus (along with Zeshui Xu and a few others) – either as an author, or as the source of most of the citations.
Though it is tempting to dismiss all this as flim-flam and flapdoodle, a whole network of researchers devote their time to this field. They devise new generalisations, new data structures, new algorithms for combining them. Pythagorean, hesitant, bipolar, 2-tuple, triangular, Hamacher, Fermatean, Bonferonni, TODIM, VIKOR… calling out to be arranged into the lyrics of a Tom Lehrer song. Fortunately none of this work ever encounters the cruel practicalities of real-world decision-making, which would oblige someone to settle on a specific algorithm as more useful than others, cutting short this speculative exploration of the Higher Obscurities.
These generalisations include Neutrosophics which deserves a post of its own. Reactions to Neutrosophistry vary… some regard it as the biggest bolus of fiddle-faddle since A. E. Van Vogt dreamed up ‘Null-Aristotelean Logic’ as a Jedi mind-trick to advance the plots of his super-human / science-fiction novels, but its fans insist that it’s the next step in human cognition while its originator (Florentin Smarandache) is a prophet, a Philosopher-King, the Ersatz-Haderach, a genius on a level with Galileo, Newton and Einstein combined. The corresponding W*k*pedia page was so intensely contested that it became a demilitarised zone with its own UN Peacekeeping force, and then was deleted for non-notability. I am content to observe that ‘Smarandache’ rhymes with ‘caran-d’ache’ and with ‘balderdash’, together comprising 60% of a limerick.
This is not entirely a digression, as Wei is neutrosophistry-curious and frequently cites Smarandache’s magisterial works.
It is impressive, just how many journals exist to accommodate the glut of bafflegab that emanates from this academic coterie. A cursory glance over Rhipidura’s archives reveal Expert Systems, Mathematics, Complexity in addition to the already-encountered Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, Journal of Intelligent Systems and International Journal of Intelligent Systems. Crucially, despite their openness to SciGen-level symbol-shuffling trivia and obvious citation plantations, these are mostly paywalled journals, not free-to-read – unaffected by the shift to Open-Access publishing. I can’t blame predatory publishers for everything.
Meanwhile in that other milieu of picayune MHD simulations, Sheikholeslami and his coterie can choose between Journal of Molecular Liquids, Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, etc. Readers may be familiar with IJHE, distinguished by its friendliness to Fatih Sen and Ruggero Santilli, and by the dynastic nature of its editorship. It also offers hospitality to papers of the XRD-forgery genre.
Journal of Molecular Liquids is another familiar name, on account of Xiangke Wang’s role as one of its editors. Hayat’s hagiography informs us that “Results in Physics and Journal of Molecular Liquids are listed in [Hayat’s] top two most preferred channels of communication having the impact factor 4.019 and 5.065 with 119 and 105 publications respectively”. As for Results in Physics in turn, what are the odds that it would be edited by charlatans?
I’ll steal a few sentences from RationalWiki rather than try to explain the existence and the role of these journals myself. The subject is still citation manipulation, in the context of the celebrated case of ‘E-infinity’ theorist bullshit-artist El Naschie (which should have discredited Impact Factors and citation indices back in 2008).
“Given the “long tail” of poor journals which has been observed throughout academic publishing, many “non-mainstream” scientists have found journals willing to carry their articles. […]
Moreover, due to Elsevier’s practice of “bundling” journals, so that universities receive substantial cost breaks for purchasing subscriptions to pre-determined sets of Elsevier journals, many university libraries were all but forced to shell out thousands of dollars for subscriptions to the dubious journal …”
It takes a lot to aggrievate these journals, is my point here.
Nor is it easy to get punished for academic malfeasance through other channels. Chinese offices of Research Integrity (for instance) are unlikely to act. They are notoriously underfunded and understaffed, so they maximise their impact by monitoring PubPeer, ready to make an example of a few random cases once the PubPeer dilettantes have finished an investigation for them.
Even so, it turns out that many of the researchers with whom Tasawar Hayat does business are crooks and charlatans. They plagiarise, they recycle manuscripts again and again, they fake results and (worst of all) they get caught. Yes, Hayat is sufficiently well-rewarded for the appearance of his name on and in previous papers that he can go on paying for his name to appear on or in papers to come, but the low ethical calibre of his suppliers must be immensely disappointing. I am beginning to think that there are downsides to inflating one’s co-authorship and citations on a transactional basis.
It is not clear why striking students at Quaid e Azam University were recently demanding Hayat’s resignation. Perhaps his mathematical profligacy caused him to neglect his administrative, professorial duties. His role as Secretary-General of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences must take up time, forcing short-cuts in his other activities.
I stress that Hayat is totally not a plagiarist. We know this because of an inquiry into allegations. Reports list the papers that allegedly benefited from the uncredited work of others, but not the papers that were supposedly plundered:
“An initial review of research papers accused of plagiarism was carried by an independent expert committee constituted by the HEC. The committee has not found plagiarism in the papers, therefore no further action is required in this regard,” reads a letter signed by HEC Quality Assurance Deputy Director Munir Ahmed.
In April, Dr Tasawar Hayat was accused of stealing his research work in the published papers from different sources. […] Following these allegations, the HEC formed an impartial committee to probe the matter which termed the accused impeccable.”
It may be that the impartial committee of academicians who examined those allegations were not burdened with that information so as not to confuse them while they ruled on Hayat’s blamelessness.
CODA
Thanks Alexander Magazinov for pointing out ’empirical economics’ as another arena where Hayat’s versatility manifests itself, in the form of papers co-authored with Nicholas Apergis (of Piraeus and Derby Universities) and Tareq Saeed.
Now I am not wise in the ways of economists, so I cannot judge the novelty of these results. The papers convey a sense of internal coherence to my unlettered eye, however, and no-one has said harsh words about them in PubPeer. But the cleverness of this work lies in procuring the right data-sets, suitable for an application of Granger Causality or what-have-you: there is no novel higher mathematics. Thus those Inquiring Minds with the ‘satiable curiosity continue to wonder about Hayat’s actual contribution.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I lied about no more Xiangke Wang examples. Please join with Thallarcha Lechrioleuca in marvelling as sorption of U(vi) ions produces identical XPS ‘spectra’ in AO/MOF nanomaterial [left, red profile] and sulfonated GO [right, blue profile]! Respectively, Figures 4(d) of Li et al (2018) and 3 of Sun et al (2017).
The repurposing was even better in Wang et al (2014) and Zhang et al (2014). Who would have guessed that if you flip an XPS spectrum horizontally, you can present it as an independent measurement of the same situation, while deconvolving it into different combinations of orbital-resonance ‘basis functions’?
The two papers provide independently-obtained X-ray diffraction patterns for different nanocomposites. Except they’re the same XRD for 2θ less than about 28°.
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Hope Leonid allows me to advertise my own dive into the abyss of another “magnetohydrodynamics” journal – Springer’s “Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry.” As old as March this year (2021).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PRqr2pLnNqY6OzDDqesnX86yhZL6wDVv/view
One mistake to be corrected there. While tried to merge different variants of authors’ names – I missed… Tasawar Hayat. With “Tasawar Hayat (10)” and “T. Hayat (7)”, he appears to be the most frequent author in that journal for 2019-2020. Surprise-surprise!
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Excellent!
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But no, Alexander, you are completely wrong. I looked it up, the journal is perfectly trustworthy:
“Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry is a fully peer reviewed journal publishing high quality papers…”.
Predatory journals charge merely a couple of hundred dollars, but here you must pay €2590 per paper. Also:
https://www.springer.com/journal/10973/ethics-and-disclosures
“The journal is committed to maintaining the highest level of integrity in the content published.
[…]
The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and subscribes to its principles on how to deal with acts of misconduct thereby committing to investigate allegations of misconduct in order to ensure the integrity of research.”
See, you should apologise to Prof Szilágyi, his editor friends and to Springer Nature for saying bad things about their scholarly journal.
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My understanding is that the protests initially were against an unexpected raise of tuition fees. Then Hayat apparently told the protesters to go f*** themselves, in quite a one-sided manner.
Because, perhaps, money are needed to get author slots in more papers.
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well, Hayat had to pay €2590 for each paper he published in that Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry alone. Students should be grateful he didn’t sell them into slavery or for organ harvesting.
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“the underlying subjectivity is lost within the legerdemain”. Legerdemain, legerhier, but never legeraujourd’hui.
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So proud of the level of education and wit my readers have!
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huh?
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The iceberg of Xiangke Wang was scratched little bit more increasing his pubpeer record to 95. Several papers appeared to be corrected without prior comments on pubpeer. Corrections are related to identical XRD, SEM and XPS spectra of precursor materials published in several papers. It is not a problem if the same material was used in two studies. It is puzzling when the same image is recorded using two different electron microscopes.
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