Irrelevant Citations on 10.1371/journal.pone.0330619

Four irrelevant citations to HONG Yanggang (洪扬刚) with Wenzhou Medical University (温州医科大学) are discovered on the article [1].

Three of those four citations are grouped in Ref. 38-40 with a single statement "[G]enerally, a protein cannot work alone. In order to perform a function of a protein, it interacts with other one or more proteins within the cells. The protein-protein interaction (PPI) network is widely used in identifying diseases related key-genes (KGs) from a set of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) [37–40]", suggesting those citations may be manipulated.

The 5GH Team also notes that HONG Yanggang acted as the handling editor for the article, which was published on PLoS ONE. It remains unknown whether there were misbehaviour from HONG during his practice as the handling editor. The 5GH Team is waiting for comment from the publisher.



Reference

[1] 10.1371/journal.pone.0330619






Author: WU Guangheng

Founder and Chair of the 5GH Foundation

E-Mail: wu@5gh.org.cn

Document ID: 5GH-2025-000017.R5

Publication Date: 2025.12.14

This article is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License

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