Review Report: Research Progress on Membrane Bioreactor Removal of Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater

Academic fraud report · Geng Detector

Summary

This Geng academic-integrity report examines a 2026 review article (DOI: 10.16796/j.cnki.1000⁃3770.2026.04.003) titled 'Research Progress on Membrane Bioreactor Removal of Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater' by Xu Ming et al., published in Technology of Water Treatment. As a review, the article is not subject to image-manipulation or original-data checks. The verdict is 'suspicious' (yellow), driven primarily by editorial sloppiness rather than fabrication. The most concrete defect is duplicated reference entries: [37] and [63] share identical title, journal, year, volume, and page range, but [63] shows garbled author names ('A Z X, B X S, A Y L, et al.'), consistent with an EndNote export error or unmerged duplicates. Additional concerns include cross-section citation mismatches around ref [38] and a tight but feasible CiteSpace search window (2015-01-01 to 2025-11-01, 254 papers). No experimental data or images are available for forensic review. Confidence in the duplication finding is high; broader fraud claims are unsupported.

Verdict

Suspicious (Yellow) — editorial/reference hygiene problems, not confirmed fabrication. The article is a literature review, so core experimental-image and raw-data forensic checks are inapplicable. The principal concrete issue is a duplicated, garbled reference entry.

Key findings

Duplicated reference entry with corrupted author field: Reference [37] and [63] are identical in title, journal, year, volume, and page numbers, but [63] lists authors as 'A Z X, B X S, A Y L, et al.', strongly suggesting an unmerged duplicate from a reference manager (e.g., EndNote) export error.
Internal citation inconsistency: Citation [38] (LE T-H et al., 2018) is used in both Section 3.3 (antibiotics, oxytetracycline) and Section 4.2 (Case Two, Singapore pilot study); the surrounding numbering (e.g., [28, 36–37]) suggests re-numbering was not propagated through the manuscript.
Bibliometric search window plausibility: The CiteSpace search claims 2015-01-01 to 2025-11-01, yielding 254 papers, with a submission date of 2025-12-05. The timeline is logically possible, but the small corpus may reflect very strict inclusion criteria; this could not be independently re-verified without the search string.
No analyzable experimental figures: Figures 1–4 are bibliometric maps, schematic diagrams, or process flow charts, which are not subject to pixel-level manipulation checks.

Evidence highlights

Reference [37] (verbatim): XU Z, SONG X, LI Y, et al. Removal of antibiotics by sequencing-batch membrane bioreactor for swine wastewater treatment [J]. Science of The Total Environment, 2019, 684:23-30.
Reference [63] (verbatim): A Z X, B X S, A Y L, et al. Removal of antibiotics by sequencing-batch membrane bioreactor for swine wastewater treatment [J]. Science of The Total Environment, 2019, 684:23-30.
DOI: 10.16796/j.cnki.1000⁃3770.2026.04.003
Journal: Technology of Water Treatment (水处理技术)
Year/issue: April 2026 (Vol. issue 04)
Submission date referenced in report: 2025-12-05
CiteSpace search window: 2015-01-01 to 2025-11-01; 254 papers retained

Notes

The review cites a National Key R&D Program; the report recommends the authors' group self-audit other outputs for similar batch-production patterns, but no evidence of systemic fraud is presented here.
Recommended corrective action: publish an erratum deleting the duplicate reference [63] and re-checking all in-text citation numbering.
The author of the report (Geng) and the report itself explicitly state this is an AI-assisted discussion; final determination of misconduct requires institutional investigation. This translation preserves all numeric and DOI information as given; no new findings have been added.