Mass Retractions at Environmental Research Due to Unauthorised Authorship Changes
Since 2025, Environmental Research, an Elsevier journal, has retracted 129 articles over unauthorised authorship changes and other issues. Authors from India, Vietnam, China, and West Asia accounted for a dominant share of these 129 articles. Multiple authors affiliated with Sun Yat-Sen University, Shandong University, Nanjing Forestry University, and Jiangsu University were involved in these unethical practices.
Most of the retracted articles were published between 2021 and 2024, when the journal was under the management of the previous Editor-in-Chief, Wang Aijie (王爱杰), of the Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Although the publisher required the editorial team to oversee authorship changes during the publication process, this policy was ignored or deliberately violated by that editorial team. A previous investigation by the 5GH Team uncovered unethical editorial practices by former Editor-in-Chief Wang Aijie.
Recently, Chinese researchers have been seeking greater influence in the academic publishing industry. On the other hand, records of unethical conduct involving Chinese editors raise concerns about whether their contributions will help build a more sustainable academic publishing industry in the future.