Chinese Secondary School Students Win on the Match of Academic Publishing
Previously, an investigation by the 5GH team [1] suggested that 69 articles published on Elsevier journals, in 2024, were coauthored by secondary school students. Most of them (66 articles) were from China.
Recently, the 5GH team extended their investigation to include 4 major publishers, namely Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and IEEE, in globe. Similar search strategy to the investigation [1] was applied, and the team found total 98 articles were likely coauthored by secondary school students, 69 on Elsevier, 17 on Wiley, 4 on Taylor & Francis, and 8 on IEEE.
94 of these 98 articles were coauthored by secondary school students from China, with a similar proportion (96%) to the previous investigation (95%) [1]. Among the remaining 4 articles, three were from United States, and one was from Greece.
Although some concerns were raised about the authorship by the Chinese secondary school students, it is very difficult to say how many articles are problematics, and this needs further investigations.
The 5GH team also want to emphasize that low numbers of publications from other countries may due to the search strategy applied in this and the previous investigation [1], and may also due to the possibility that most academic articles from secondary school students were not published on international journals with the above-mentioned 4 publishers.
The current and the previous investigations [1] suggest abnormal publication records from Chinese secondary school students, compared to their counterparts from the other part of the globe. However, it is hard to say "we win".
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