7 of 23 Articles in a Elsevier Special Issue Came from a Same Institution in China
Up to recently (July 17th, 2024), the special issue "Eurasian Grassland Ecosystems: Changes, Drivers and Consequences at Multi-scales" of the journal "Science of the Total Environment" has published 23 articles. 7 of them (about 1 in 3) have author(s) come from Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning (IARRP), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Among them, 4 have first author from this institution.
This special issue was edited by four guest editors: QI Jiaguo, XIN Xiaoping, Raffaele LAFORTEZZA, and WANG Qinxue. QI and WANG are working outside China at Michigan State University (United States) and National Institute for Environmental Studies (Japan), respectively. LAFORTEZZA is working for both University of Bari Aldo Moro (Italy) and Beijing Forestry University (China). But XIN is affiliated to IARRP, the authors from which dominated the authorship of the special issue.
XIN coauthored in 3 articles of this special issue. This may be against the policy of the publisher Elsevier, who allows the guest editor(s) to publish maximum ONE article on their special issue, unless the editor in chief approves them to publish more.
What is more, although the article [1] was not coauthored by XIN, two of its authors, WANG Xu and SHEN Beibei, coauthored with XIN in another article [2] on the same special issue, suggesting close relationship between them.
Concerns are raised that XIN guest-edited the special issue to promote the publications from IARRP. But it may be another reason: XIN was not able to recruit enough articles, so that her friends in IARRP "helped" her. Or it may be other reasons we do not know yet. But the scientific community wants an answer to this question.
Reference
[1] 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170886
