Issues on 10.1371/journal.pone.0328913
An investigation suggests several integrity issues on the article [1]:
(1) The authorship is problematic.
The article [1] is about the applications of herb plants in a Pakistan community. Authors claim they collected the herb plants in the community, and interviewed with the local residents. However, three researchers from China are listed as the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd authors of the article. Those three Chinese authors hardly got involved in such practices.
The funding sources for this article [1] were solely form China, and they are irrelevant to the research reported on the article. According to a document [2] received by the 5GH Team, the funding "JGJX2023D839" acknowledged in the article is about "Research on the Characteristic Construction of Application-Oriented Undergraduate Institutions in Jilin Province from the Perspective of the Educational Ecosystem in the Digital Age" (translated from Chinese "数字化时代教育生态视域下吉林省应用型本科院校特色建设研"). And the second funding is "Research on the Application of Stable Diffusion in Landscape Architecture Design in the AI Era".
These suggest that the three Chinese likely purchased the authorship via an unknown measure.
(2) Abnormal patterns are identified in the data on several tables.
On Table 3, the UV values are exclusively to be 0.8 and 0.6, except for a "0.86" and a "0.66". While on Table 4, The FL (%) values are exclusively to be 80 and 60, except for a "66".
On Table 1, sum of the numbers with different "Educational Background" is 311, exceed to the total number (300) of the participants interviewed by the authors.
Reference
[1] 10.1371/journal.pone.0328913
[2] 2023年度吉林省高教科研课题立项名单 (in Chinese, accessed on August 12th, 2025)
