Fake structures published in Acta Crystallographica

Stop press from the wonderful world of scientific misconduct:


"Regrettably, this editorial is to alert readers and authors of Acta Crystallographica Section E and the wider scientific community to the fact that we have recently uncovered evidence for an extensive series of scientific frauds involving papers published in the journal, principally during 2007. Although several thousands of structures published in Acta Crystallographica Section E every year will continue to reflect results of serious scientific work, the extent of these problems is significant with at least 70 structures demonstrated to be falsified and meanwhile acknowledged by the authors as such...

...The falsified structures have many features in common: in each case, a bona fide set of intensity data, usually on a compound whose structure had been correctly determined and reported in the literature, was used to produce a number of papers, with the authors changing one or more atoms in the structure to produce what appeared to be a genuine structure determination of a new compound. The worst example generated no fewer than 18 supposedly original structures from a single common set of data. There is nothing to suggest that the authors of the original papers describing the real structures are in any way aware of, or complicit in, this fraud...

...The initial set of falsified structures arises from two groups. The correspondence authors are Dr H. Zhong and Professor T. Liu, both from Jinggangshan University, Jian, China. The co-authors on these papers included other workers from Jinggangshan University together with authors from different institutions in China. Both these correspondence authors and all co-authors have signed forms agreeing to the retraction of 41 papers published by Dr Zhong and 29 by Professor Liu. Details of these retractions appear elsewhere in this issue of the journal. Having found these problems with articles from Jinggangshan University, all submissions from this University to Acta Crystallographica Sections E or C have now been identified and are being checked for authenticity. Preliminary results indicate that further retractions will result from this exercise."


Huh, this way they will end up with checking every single submitted structure by hands soon...