The journal ‘ChemSusChem’ was informed already a year ago about fraud in their journal. 'Chemical Communications' has been informed about manipulations that inflate claims by 300%.
Reproduction of Figure 5b from ChemCommun article Ref[2]: The claimed results are on a black curve that seems to be advanced (added green arrow) over all the best results in the field, which are limited to below the added green line (roughly). Piercing this boundary would be a major scientific advance in need of theoretical explanation. Actually, the proper calculations land in the center of the added red circle, so far below the state of the art that journals would reject without peer review.If you still believe what scientists tell you about how science works, you may think that such is taken seriously, perhaps that editors may even feel personally played and disrespected by such attempts at undermining the journals they take proudly responsibility for. Wrong! Instead, in reality, cheating is so common, seeing a problem with such is treated as disrespect. Now you may think: But what about science; what about those whose efforts may fail on grounds of having taken fraudulent claims to be scientific data, say the poor graduate students in other research groups? Does it not belong to the responsibility of the editor to inform the scientific community about cheating as fast as possible?
Claims of 180 degree bends as if you can fold something back on itself: Actually, the small 1 cm length device is between the two red lines and hardly curved. This is what the publish-or-perish culture has naturally selected to survive, and if you do not want to go along, your career will be destroyed. Editors of respected journals will "help" you with pretentious mission statements about their role and the ethics of publishing, integrity of peer review and all that. They also put the last nail in your coffin for daring to scratch the shiny façade of post-modern post-truth careerism.I spare you the many details of a year long soap-opera, including such marvels as an Editor-in-Chief blaming his "immediate superior" (my inquiries confirmed the obvious: he has none!). Finally, after a year of supporting the perpetrators of the fraud, ensuring that it stays hidden and that they could go on publishing more of such, we are now given the appearance of that the scientific community is properly informed, at least about the deceptions in ChemSusChem – ChemCommun still does not care at all. But of course, the people at ChemSusChem only got tired and hope to shut the case this way, and so they did not even publish what they finally agreed to. Did you know that it is apparently scientific publishing ethics to still revise the final proof copy that the author supplied in order to change the meaning of the paper? I did not either, but this is 2017, welcome to that science that you are supposed to trust.
A mere correspondence was, seemingly but not really, allowed, no full article comment, and what ChemSusChem “published” is hidden under "Conference Reports". The citation to the relevant criticized article was changed, which hinders the comment from appearing as a relevant citing article anywhere near the fraudulent work. See, we do not want anybody to actually read a critical work, especially nobody who reads the fraudulent paper, which is still well advertised just as before. The proof correction of the reference section was re-changed, so "Ref[1]" is to an article in the wrong volume, 10 instead of 9, and supposedly in (2017). Ref[1] was already published in April(!) of 2016. There is no potential confusion about being "only online" in November or suchlike. The correct year is also in the DOI number, and if you click on the "How to cite"-button on the article's web page at ChemSusChem, yep, you guessed it; of course the correct citation comes up - it is not so that ChemSusChem does not know how to cite ChemSusChem. But somebody at ChemSusChem made sure that the citation in the comment first got "mistakes" and that those "mistakes" then stayed wrong despite the author’s correction.
More unauthorized changes start right away with the abstract, see (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/cssc.201700330/abstract), where there is suddenly a "It is argued that ..." in front. It seems as if the author is not confident about what he is talking about. According to whoever rewrote the paper, the author of the comment just tries to argue something tentatively, you see, because such whistle blowers are all a bunch of hotheads who don't even know about something although they were actively participating in it! Yes, you got that? Look at the authors: The author of the comment is one of the authors listed in the fraudulent papers! You would think he might be more confident.
Of all the unauthorized changes, about a dozen that distort the meanings of phrases, the following two are the most telling, had been corrected also in the proof copy, but the unauthorized reformulations by ChemSusChem have been nevertheless published, under the author's good name without his consent and explicit warnings against it, just like with the original fraud:
Note that in the previously published Ref.[2], the same authors explicitly mention "selected, linear voltage-drop ranges ΔV and corresponding Δt". Therefore, the authors were aware of that they were selecting subranges and they cannot claim that this is merely an accusation based on misinterpreting unfortunate mistakes that slipped in when using curve-fitting software or similar.
The crucial part, the very point that is proven by the publication date of Ref[2], is that the authors were fully aware of what they were doing and actively hiding the deceptive steps by, for example, removing previously used phrases so that peer reviewers will not find the deceptions easily. (One previous reviewer at a different journal found fraudulent steps and rejected – one out of six “scientific experts”, LOL). This most crucial part was changed, from "the authors were aware" (written by one of the original authors!!!) into "authors should have been aware ...".
No, the comment is not a recommendation and the rephrasing is scientifically simply wrong. We were 100% aware! The article clearly proves this, and the editors were informed of this right after publication, because the original second author of the article, yours truly, I(!), who actually provided much if not most of the still valuable scientific understanding to that work, explicitly warned the responsible senior co-author not to include such fraud or the paper cannot be published! The reaction was not to improve the work, but instead, to refuse all further cooperation, hide the fraud even better and submit to another journal, ChemSusChem, behind the second authors' back. The second author was further punished for his crime of trying to rescue some remnant of the integrity of science. He was demoted by removing him from the second author position to fourth author, confident that he will once again stay silent because his critical work has made him a nobody in the hierarchies of academia. Similar has worked more than ten times before, see for example the recent farce here.
But even sorry losers as low as me have limits, and at some point also nothing more to lose. Sure, the reality of surviving in the scientific community today requires lots and lots of bending truth, staying away from inconvenient truths, ridiculous hype, "interpretations" of data and framings and cherry picking and favoritism and strategic misquoting and biased peer-reviewing and on and on and on. However, outright deceptions such as done in Ref[1] and Ref[2] cannot be published under my name without reaction, because it tarnishes the integrity of my name, putting into doubt all of my output, some of it actually interesting science rather than the splashes of my spastic academic survival through helping mediocre engineers hyping garbage with the veneer of physics.
The main message of the comment, namely that the perpetrators were aware of the fraud, was changed throughout the comment, behind the author’s and the peer-reviewers' backs (they after all approved the publication of the comment in its original form):
There are three separate steps in the calculation of the parameters, all of which increase the values: 1) Using a low ΔV results in a high C; 2) selecting the highest ΔV boosts E considerably due to its quadratic explicit dependence on the voltage; and 3) not using the correspondingly lower C(ΔV) for the implicit dependence of the energy on the voltage but rather the already overestimated C ( i.e., using two different ΔV in E(ΔV), a function that depends on one parameter (ΔV) ). As noted, the authors were aware of this, and it would be anyway an unlikely coincidence of mistakes that all inflate the main claims.
The phrase "the authors were aware of this, and it would be anyway an unlikely coincidence" was changed into "the authors should have been aware of this, and it would be an unlikely coincidence", as if it was perhaps an unfortunate mistake we should have known about, but alas ... . It was premeditated scientific fraud, but the journals do not care. Publishing hyped garbage and fraud is welcome at ChemSusChem and ChemCommun and all(!) such journals including PhysRev and Nature and Science and so on, as many instances, such as the recent memristor hype or the impossibility to publish critically on nano bubbles have shown. Those who uphold the scientific method and try to defend the integrity of science, their careers are destroyed.
I could just withdraw the papers, yes, and then have even less publications than those who do not withdraw, moreover perhaps seeming as if I am responsible for the “mistakes”. This is how it is basically supposed to work in today’s science, that endeavor that loudly pretends to welcome critical minds, that feels entitled to some sort of authoritative position on grounds of its elevated standards of self-criticism.
Editors should not need more but a hint of that authors employed knowingly two different values dV in one and the same function of the parameter dV, in order to immediately investigate in a way that protects the whistle blower from being ousted. Knowing the reality of what goes on in institutions, nobody at the whistle blower’s university should ever get to know about who contacted the editors! Is that not obvious? Many on the editorial board were kept updated about everything, and yet none intervened, witnessing as it was ensured that the whistle blower can no longer publish while the perpetrators of the fraud can go on, and they do as we speak, enjoying the fruits of their deeds. If you would like to ask the editors whether they sleep well and are proud of being all pretentious about how important they are for science while making a career out of destroying it ever further, you can ask Editor-in-Chief David Smith of ChemSusChem here: dsmith02@wiley.com .
The most impressive graph of my career will be the development of the attained journal Impact Factor of a certain person's publishing record. For almost ten years I have held them back by insisting on proper science. The ChemComm article, where I did not yet notice the fraud, is already Impact Factor 6.6. The subsequent fraud in ChemSusChem resulted in Impact Factor 7.1. And now finally, by having just published another such work entirely without me, success, Impact Factor 15.2 - this is how you do it. The only thing that stood in between them and the renowned journal of Advanced Energy Materials was this damn bastard always insisting on actual science rather than a bunch of goobledygook around data that graduate students make up in order to graduate. Its another hockey stick graph, and right at the knee is where I get kicked out. No, not in order to deprive me of the fruits of many years of hard work, but as the main thing that made the success possible, namely getting rid of the one guy who insisted on adherence to the scientific method.
With this, it is really time to finally turn away from this so called "science". I had it. I entered science because I thought it is something to do with doing good, with helping to make the world a better place. Yes, how naive I was. Damn, if I wanted to just talk nonsense and deceive people, I could have made some major shekels instead of being a poor piece of grime everybody laughs at.
Do you think something should be done? Well, you have all the information. Good luck! I do no longer give a moist rodent’s behind. I had it. I mean, being suppressed for criticizing others I understand, but not even be able to properly do something about outright fraud published behind your back under your good name without harming your career even more? Thanks a bundle.
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Ref [1] H. Xie, S. Tang, D. Li, S. Vongehr, X. Meng: "Flexible Asymmetric Supercapacitors Based on Nitrogen-Doped Graphene Hydrogels with Embedded Nickel Hydroxide Nanoplates." ChemSusChem 9, (2016) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/cssc.201600150
Ref [2] B.G. Zhu, S.C. Tang, S. Vongehr, H. Xie, J. Zhu, X.K. Meng: "FeCo2O4 submicron-tube arrays grown on Ni foam as high rate-capability and cycling-stability electrodes allowing superior energy and power densities with symmetric supercapacitors." Chemical Communications 52, 2624-2627 (2016) DOI: 10.1039/c5cc08857g
Ref [3] S. Vongehr: "Comment on “Flexible Asymmetric Supercapacitors Based on Nitrogen-Doped Graphene Hydrogels with Embedded Nickel Hydroxide Nanoplates." ChemSusChem 10, (2017) doi/10.1002/cssc.201700330 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cssc.201700330/pdf
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