Crystallographic Absurdities Exposed

P. Veĝtát

 ­­­FZU - Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 182 00 Praha 8, Czech Republic.

vertat@fzu.cz

The increasing volume of scientific publications leads to a rise in intriguing, yet sometimes dubious, crystallographic results being published. As reviewers cannot be experts in every field, many absurd results appear even in top-tier journals. In my slightly informal talk, I will present an overview of the most astonishing crystallographic absurdities I have encountered in recent years. Together, we will explore instances of:

-      Faked XRD data: Do some of the peaks contradict your conclusions? Feel free to delete them!

-      Surprising duplicities: It is more ecologically friendly to recycle your old Bragg-Brentano scans and use them in your next article about a totally new sample of different composition.

-      Interesting fits: The fact that your calculated and observed curves do not match at all does not need to prevent you from publishing in, say, the Journal of Molecular Structure.

-      Weird XRD patterns: Yeah, smoothing will always make your curves look better! It does not matter that your functions are no longer functions, Figure 1.

-      Almost poetic AI-generated article sections: "At room temperature, when the X-ray generators were working at 40 kV and transmitting a charge of 30 mA to the target, it was considered a successful hit."

-      And much more.

A graph of a graph showing the number of a number of electrons Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Figure 1. "XRD spectral analysis of hydrothermal synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles from ZnSO4.7H2O zinc salt precursor." as an example of an interesting XRD pattern. Additionally, the authors have accidentally labelled "Two theta (degree)" as "Wavelength (nm)". Adapted from [1] (showing only one of the three curves from the original figure). The original content is licensed under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

My aim is not only to provide good cheer but, more importantly, to spread awareness and highlight the most common issues you might encounter while critically reviewing an article. Since people are sneaky and inventive, not all the flaws discussed will be as obvious as those listed above. I will also introduce pubpeer.com as an example of platforms that allow users to discuss and review scientific research after publication.

1. B. Bekele et al., Journal of Nanomaterials, 2021(1), 9210817.

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation grant no. 23-4806S.