A year ago, Alexander Magazinov had an email exchange with Philippe Garrigues, retired CNRS Research Director at the University of Bordeaux in France, France, and Editor-in-Chief of journals dedicated to environmental pollution.

Thing is, his journals are massively polluted by papermill fraud. But Garrigues did not seem concerned by the fraud and the suspicious identities of his “authors”, rather by the identity of Magazinov:

“We are living in a faked world and there is a lot of un-verified avatars.
So the names of the people, the e-mail adresses and the institutions must be checked.“

In 2019, Springer published a laudatory editorial to celebrate Garrigues on the occasion of his retirement as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry. The article mentioned:

“In addition to serving as an ABC Editor for the past 18 years, Philippe has also been the Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds since 1998 and Environmental Science and Pollution Research since 2011. He plans to continue in these Editor-in-Chief roles in the foreseeable future.”

And now read how well Garrigues manages these two journals now, all while pursuing his real interests of “boating, fishing, diving, and surfing“, travelling “the world in search of good surf and exotic diving opportunities” and “building two new homes on the site of his family home so that he (and his guests) can enjoy more boating and fishing“.

It is all very French. Be white, male, and from a good family, and you will have money, status and leisure, while someone else does all the work for you. In this case, the Asian papermills. There is of course a spreadsheet with over 180 entries.

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Environmental Pseudoscience and Polluted Research

By Alexander Magazinov

Let’s talk about an almost mega-journal by Springer, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, with 5800+ articles published in the current year, 2023, and over 7200 articles in 2022, according to Dimensions. That is a result of some explosive growth: for example, in 2014, only 1539 articles were published there.

Its Editor-in-Chief is Philippe Garrigues, whose contribution to the editorial work is immense: the search for “Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues“ among the journal’s articles reveals a pace of over a thousand of articles yearly since 2016, peaking at 1698 in 2019!

As an excuse for writing this post, I will use the fresh (2023) edition of Clarivate’s “Highly Cited Researchers” list, where we find a certain Wasim Iqbal.

At a face value, Iqbal is a stereotypical citation farmer. For example, here, a batch of citations to Iqbal is injected into an article, most certainly a papermill product, nominally authored by two no-name Chinese scholars.

Yuan Tian , Luxi Li, Impact of financial inclusion and globalization on environmental quality: evidence from G20 economies, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2022), doi: 10.1007/s11356-022-19618-9.

The “responsible editor” is Nicholas Apergis, and this is not his first appearance in this blog. The previous one was seriously damning: he was called out as a publication supplier to Tasawar Hayat, the anti-hero of the below referenced post.

A worthy member of the editorial board, indeed. Actually, Apergis handled pretty much all earlier Iqbal’s citation vehicles, only later joined by others: for example, Garrigues himself (Wu and Song, 2023), Arshian Sharif (Zheng et al., 2023), or Ilhan Ozturk (Wang, 2023). There, Sharif never misses on the opportunity to extort citations to himself. In turn, the Ozturk-handled paper features a ridiculous citation to another Ozturk, Merve, in a co-authorship with Ibrahim Dincer, the “special issue coordinating editor” of International Journal of Hydrogen Energy! You can read below about that Elsevier journal run by a Turkish family:

Am I unjustly singling out Environmental Science and Pollution Research for too welcoming attitude to Iqbal’s citation vehicles? Not really. In mid-May 2023, when I searched for all papers that cite Iqbal 6 times or more, I found 86 of them. More than a half, 45 namely, were in the Garrigues’ journal, followed by Frontiers in Environmental Sciences (9), Elsevier’s Renewable Energy (8) and – surprise! – Frontiers in Psychology (8). The latter is a very obscure choice for this topic, but I am not sure if Frontiers can be bothered by some out-of-scope trash articles. Nonetheless, a spreadsheet is here.

Yet the main purpose for calling out Iqbal was not to expose a rather minor cheater, but to introduce a template on which the scam is built. This template accounts for a significant fraction of Environmental Science and Pollution Research‘s massive output, maybe even over a half. But be sure, other scams are welcome there, too.

Now, to the template. The description was kindly shared with me by a colleague, known on PubPeer as Agalinis laxa.

1. Write a long introduction, with a literature discussion section. (Possibly also include a tables summarising previous literature using similar approach.)
2. Download national data from a global database, most common is World Bank Open Data (https://data.worldbank.org/)
3. Specify a complex autoregressive time-series regression model, with many lags. Be sure to define the model by writing out all the equations in full (even if the technique is presented in undergraduate econometrics text books).
4. Present the regression outputs across several tables. Results and discussion focus on regression coefficients, with minimal interpretation. Often have plots linking predictor variables with arrows showing the signs of regression coefficients.
5. Conclude with a trivially true statement like “The government of [insert country] should implement economic [investment/policies/processes] that address [climate change/greenhouse gas emissions/sustainable development]”.

Now let’s see, as an example, how the above (Tian and Li, 2022) paper fits this description.

• Lengthy introduction – check. Let’s look at the composition: the introductory part occupies half of page 1, entire pages 2, 3, 4, and almost half of the page 5. The rest of page 5, pages 6, 7, 8, 9, and a tiny bit of page 10 are the core “research,” while the rest, almost two and a half pages long, is allotted to the references. As expected, almost half of the text is used to reference this guy, that guy, and the other guy too – because, well, apart from authorship market, citation market is what drives this business.
  
  No table of literature in this case, but it is optional anyway.
  
• Download data, most commonly from World Bank – check of course.
  
  “We have used data on financial inclusion, globalization, renewable energy consumption, CO2 emissions, real GDP corruption and industrial structure. One of the most significant regressors is financial inclusion. Grounded on five various attributes of financial inclusion, we came up with a composite financial inclusion index (FII). The information comes from the Global Financial Development Database (GFDD) of the World Bank.“
  
• Autoregressive model with lags, providing all formulas – check too. “Cross‐sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lags” and all the stuff. But let us have a look at some passages!
  
  “The presence of cross-sectional dependence (CD) in panel data should be thoroughly investigated because it could lead to results that are skewed and inconsistent (Phillips and Sul, 2003). Real-world connections include political, social, economic and other channels like bilateral trade and board sharing. A CD in the model variables may be caused by this type of associativity between countries. Pesaran’s CD test and Breusch and Pagan’s (1980) Lagrange multiplier (LM) test are used to address the same issue.“
  
  “Cross-sectional Im-Pesaran-Shin (CIPS) and cross-sectionally augmented Dickey-Fuller (CADF) introduced by Pesaran (2007) are used to solve this problem.“
  
  “Using structural dynamics, Westerlund (2007) proposes four basic panel cointegration tests that do not enforce any common factor limitations.“
  
  “When errors are inter-sectional, the ARDL technique offers consistent parameter estimates irrespective of whether the causal variables are I(0) or I(1) in their integration order, which is characteristic of regressors, according to Pesaran and Smith (1995) and Pesaran et al. (1999).“
  
  It all looks great, except there is no Phillips and Sul among the references! No Breusch and Pagan, no Pesaran – neither 1999, nor 2007, no Pesaran and Smith, no Westerlund! As if the text was hastily copy-pasted from elsewhere, without even a cursory check. Something like “peer review” could have caught this, but that obsolete practice has been abolished in Environmental Science and Pollution Research long ago.
  
• Output tables, discussion focused on coefficients with minimal interpretation – also check.
  
  “A 1% increase in corruption has a long-term effect on CO2 emissions of 0.277%“
  
  and more in the same spirit. In a second, we will learn what this means.
  
• Stupid / trivial conclusion – and this checks as well. How about
  
  “The findings show that, between 2004 and 2017, financial inclusion, globalization and economic growth increased energy consumption, which directly increased carbon emissions in G20 nations, while enhanced corruption reduced ­CO2 emissions“?
  
  The more corrupt your government is, the better for the Earth? Good to know. Of course, policy recommendations are there too:
  
  “To begin with, because of the increased environmental impact of economic globalization, such as foreign investments and financial institutions, it is recommended that efforts be made to optimize and upgrade the industrial structure in order to reduce pollution emissions and achieve long-term sustainability.“
  
  Standing ovations now! What a deep insight! (Not at all.)

No doubt, we should accept that this template is the proper science. Throw away any doubt and don’t let a few weak voices of losers distract you! Thousands, if not tens of thousands properly vetted, solid contributions to the scientific literature are forever with us, and there will be more!

However, it is hard to avoid repetitions if you run a template-based production of any significant volume. Invariably, at some point there arises a need to bypass plagiarism checks. Is it a hint to “tortured phrases”? Absolutely!

Tomiwa Sunday Adebayo, Festus Fatai Adedoyin, Dervis Kirikkaleli, Toward a sustainable environment: nexus between consumption-based carbon emissions, economic growth, renewable energy and technological innovation in Brazil, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2021), doi: 10.1007/s11356-021-14425-0.

And this was the authors’ response on PubPeer:

“Hello Cabanac,
There are various reasons why some phrases may have been missed or unchecked thoroughly by the entire team. The collaborations sometimes include people without very strong English language capabilities.
However this has been noted and have been enhanced in other collaborative efforts.“

Festus Fatai Adedoyin

This Festus Fatai Adedoyin happens to be a “Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing and Informatics, Bournemouth University, U.K.,” so him being “without very strong English language capabilities” is somewhat a surprise. Nonetheless, what “enhancement” can happen in “other collaborative efforts”? Some of them are more evident than others, like the one below.

“The phrase “Regenerate Response” is the label of a button in ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that generates text according to a user’s question/prompt.
This Springer article contains the unexpected phrase “Regenerate Response” in the middle of Section 3 titled “Discussion””

– Guillaume Cabanac

ChatGPT is very reliable if your goal is to generate some meaningless mumble, so why not use it? This insolence earned a coverage in Retraction Watch even! Computer-generated content aside, even the title is outstandingly ridiculous: no way even a semi-decent referee would let it pass. But then again, it is nearly impossible to fit “decency” and “Environmental Science and Pollution Research” in one sentence.

Also directly relevant to the economy-environment-correlations template is the below Smut Clyde‘s post. If the overblown literature section can accommodate anything, why cannot fraudsters use it to promote a bunch of pirated journals? So, Environmental Science and Pollution Research turned out to be a convenient venue for this scam, too.

Back to Wasim Iqbal, we have this:

Fengqin Liu, Li Li, YunQian Zhang, Quang-Thanh Ngo, Wasim Iqbal, RETRACTED ARTICLE: Role of education in poverty reduction: macroeconomic and social determinants form developing economies, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2021), doi: 10.1007/s11356-021-15252-z.

“The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. After publication, the authors informed the journal that the data provided in Tables 2-4 were incorrect. Additionally, a number of the references cited in the article do not appear to support the authors’ statements. The Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the conclusions of this article.”

Retraction on 4 March 2022

Actually, this is everything you want to know about how this Highly Cited Researcher operates. Only if anyone paid attention. But no one does, so…

Md Qamruzzaman, Salma Karim, Sylvia Kor, Does environmental degradation matter for poverty? Clarifying the nexus between FDI, environmental degradation, renewable energy, education, and poverty in Morocco and Tunisia, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023), doi: 10.1007/s11356-023-25954-1.

There are many other types of scam generously offered by Environmental Science and Pollution Research, such as fuzzy logic hogwash (the favourite topic of the pseudonymous sleuth Rhipidura Albiventris), ibuprofen degradation by Rafael Luque (essential ingredients: an authorship-for-sale advert and “vegetative electron microscopy”), misreported SEM equipment (here, featuring Gholam Reza Mahdavinia, the supplier of SEM images to eagerly papermillers such as Christophe Hano), nanofluids (the favourite topic of Ali Chamkha, Masoud Afrand and their friends), miRNAs (out-of-scope? phew!), Eric Chabriere, etc., etc., but let us not dive into that. Sure, the Editor-in-Chief is aware of the problems and feels the need for an urgent cleanup? As you may guess, absolutely not!

Here is what I asked Garrigues in November 2022.

“Could you please explain how a certain paper in The Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.07.365, cited 551 times, managed to gain 145 citations, or more than a quarter of its total, from Environmental Science and Pollution Research? No other journal cites that paper more than 30 times. In other words, the journal with the second most citation count to the above mentioned paper is trailing behind your journal by a factor of 4.5.“

As one sees on screenshots of the Dimensions page below, one from the time when I emailed Garrigues, another taken just recently, the disbalance is stunning.

And here is the citation attractor itself.

Samuel Asumadu Sarkodie, Vladimir Strezov, Effect of foreign direct investments, economic development and energy consumption on greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, The Science of The Total Environment (2019), doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.07.365.

“As a policy implication, there is a need for a global partnership that ensures promotion, transfer, and dissemination of clean and modern technologies in developing countries that will assist in the achievement of a long-term sustainability. Energy consumption has a strong positive effect on CO2 emissions, as evidenced in the study. Deterioration of the environment stems from the overdependence on fossil fuel energy technologies to meet the growing energy demand for residential and commercial purposes. Pollution haven in developing countries also propels the adoption of fossil fuel energy technologies rather than renewables in order to accumulate low production cost of goods and services from energy-intensive and carbon-intensive industries. Therefore, a reduction of CO2 emissions and environmental pollution will depend on enhanced energy efficiency, behavioural changes in political institutions that adopts inefficient competitive advantage to lure FDI inflows with polluting technologies, the adoption of clean and modern energy technologies such as renewables, nuclear power plants, the adoption of carbon capture and storage for fossil fuel and biomass energy generation processes.”

No way we would figure it out without this piece of… scholarship! Alternatively, this is yet another manifestation of templated World Bank data juggling with trivial conclusions. The two authors, both at the time of writing affiliated to Macquarie University in Australia (hello, Navid Rabiee; bonjour, Gilles Guillemin), were:

• Samuel Asumadu Sarkodie, who later moved to Nord University, Bodø, Norway, became a Highly Cited Researcher in 2021 and 2022, but somehow fell off the 2023 list, and one wonders why.
• And Vladimir Strezov, who is still at Macquarie, as of late publishing on every convenient topic from poverty alleviation in China, through seed oil extraction and catalytic biomass pyrolysis, to dye removal. “Papermilling!” – an impatient reader may scream. Perish the thought!

And this is how Garrigues responded (typos his):

“Dear Sir,
Thank you for your messaga and we will check the back office of that matter.
However, I just wonder what is your offical position and what is your institutionnal affiliation.
Thank you for providing such details.”

Not a novel pattern of communication at all. As ruscist propaganda man Vladimir Soloviev said, “Introduce yourself, you scum!”

Apparently, the standards for those who raise concerns are way higher than for those who submit papers. Unless, of course, papers are submitted directly by papermillers working in close contact with editors in a friendly atmosphere where everyone knows each other perfectly… But since we have no proof, it could never happen. In any case, Environmental Science and Pollution Research is not much bothered about gmail identities of corresponding authors who submit scam works in scam-infested fields (take the above mentioned fuzzy logic and nanofluid papers as representative examples).

Since the exchange, the PubPeer record of Environmental Science and Pollution Research has grown substantially (here is a spreadsheet of 180+ entries) due to efforts of Guillaume Cabanac, Nick Wise, Mu Yang, Smut Clyde, and other named and pseudonymous sleuths including myself.

Muhammad Umar Ijaz , Haseeb Anwar , Shabnoor Iqbal , Hammad Ismail , Asma Ashraf , Shama Mustafa , Abdul Samad Protective effect of myricetin on nonylphenol-induced testicular toxicity: biochemical, steroidogenic, hormonal, spermatogenic, and histological-based evidences Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2021) doi: 10.1007/s11356-020-12296-5

Cabanac even got COPE involved, with several public reminders on Twitter. So there might be some investigation ongoing. Or not. No way to know for sure.

There is yet another journal-shaped outlet edited by Garrigues, and, accidentally, it is on my radar too, and has been there for quite a while before I learned who the EiC is! It is Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds, published by Taylor and Francis. It first came to my attention as a citation acceptor of some low-profile papermill product:

Zahid Raza, Muhammad Imran, Expected Values of Some Molecular Descriptors in Random Cyclooctane Chains, Symmetry (2021), doi: 10.3390/sym13112197.

The paper is loaded with unrelated citations. ”J. Inequalities Appl.” and especially ”Polycycl. Aromat. Compd.” are overrepresented in the sources, not being exactly leading venues in any field. The former is a known victim of papermill activities; see numerous retraction notes in that venue.

The paper itself, though mathematically correct, is absolutely worthless: it describes a mathematical model which is not even remotely related to anything in the real world. And anyway, should it be needed in some nightmare scenario, it would be way easier to do a school-level exercise from scratch, rather than to look up this paper. The review linked on PubPeer was a reply to the editor, Serge Lawrencenko, after he proudly announced the acceptance via his social media. Predictably, no action has been taken since.

Actually, these “topological descriptors,” or whatever the name is, happens to be yet another popular topic among papermillers – the notorious special issue in Wiley’s Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences, about which I wrote earlier, will not let me lie! And there, among the “topological descriptionists,” we indeed see the same Muhammad Imran, whose signature is on the Symmetry paper, alongside… for example, a certain Yu-Ming Chu.

As for the topic of “topological descriptors” itself, all the necessary words happened to be said by Stefan H. Unger already in 1987:

“Molecular connectivity is certainly not a fundamental variable of nature and does not code for 3-D properties; it is a highly concocted bit of numerology and is often applied with total lack of rationale. The vast number of possible indices, their squares, cubes, reciprocals, cross-products, et cetera, can only leave one with the feeling that there is a lot of fiddling going on, either intentional or out of complete naiveté.”

To be fair, one of the field’s gurus, Milan Randić, wrote a book-sized rebuttal, which anyone is welcome to read in their spare time. But we digressed.

Back to Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds, what is this?

Indah Raya, Reena Solanki, Firas Rahi Alhachami, Abduladheem Turki Jalil, Yasser Fakri Mustafa, Copper (II) Complex Immobilized on Magnetic Nanoparticles Functionalized with Imine/Thio Ligand (Fe₃O₄@SiO₂-Imine/Thio-Cu(II)): A Novel, Efficient and Reusable Nanomagnetic Catalysts for the Synthesis of 2,4,6-Triaryl Pyridines, Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds (2023), doi: 10.1080/10406638.2022.2164015.

Or what is this?

Kadda Hachem, Dmitry Bokov, Leila Mahdavian, Antioxidant Capacity of Caffeic Acid Phenethyl Ester in Scavenging Free Radicals by a Computational Insight, Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds (2023), doi: 10.1080/10406638.2022.2053174.

I hope, dear reader, you recognized these Renaissance men, Abduladheem Turki Jalil and Dmitry Bokov. And of course they are doing what they always do: papermilling. Presumably, with full editorial approval.

Or how about this Persian marvel?

Elham Saberikhah, Manouchehr Mamaghani, Nosrat Ollah Mahmoodi, Abdollah Fallah Shojaei, Magnetic Fe₃O₄@TiO₂@NH₂@PMo₁₂O₄₀ Nanoparticles: A Recyclable and Efficient Catalyst for Convergent One-Pot Synthesis of Pyrido[2,3-d]Pyrimidine Derivatives, Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds (2022), doi: 10.1080/10406638.2020.1729821.

Papermillers need convenient editors. And they find them, Garrigues is an example. Are these editors lazy, stupid, corrupt, or all of that, to accept all this trash? Well, in a sane world there would have been an investigation, and probably not limited to academic affairs. In some realistic scenarios, Garrigues’ presidency in Foundation Evertea (ex-Fondation Rovaltain) might play a significant role.

In reality, it is very likely that nothing will ever happen.

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