This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier policy on article withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor.
During the course of the investigation, the assessing editor noted an excessive amount of citations in the Introduction, including a citation to this article itself.
It was also discovered that the original and accepted versions of the manuscript contained data/figures previously published in Biomass Conv. Bioref. 14, 26173–26191 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1007/s13399-023-04977-1, by different authors, which were then removed after the manuscript was accepted, although some of the figures in the supplementary information from that source remain.
The Figure S5 in the supplementary is taken from Youtube videos such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LsgBqm3yqs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sYW9JdAj_4. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
Finally, an unauthorised authorship change was made when the revised version of this paper was submitted, following suggestions for relatively minor revisions from the reviewers and Guest Editor, with five authors – Yu Bai, Yan Cao, Yiding Sun, Faiz Abdulaziz Alfaiz, and Elimam Ali – being added to the paper to replace three other authors who were deleted. No satisfactory explanation was given for this change, nor was it approved by the editor.
According to the Credit author statement, Authors Cao and Sun appear to have been involved with conceptualisation and writing the original draft, respectively, despite both authors being added at revision stage.
This authorship change breaches the policies of the journal and as a result of this and the concerns outlined in the previous paragraph, the editors no longer have confidence in this paper and are retracting it.
The journal apologises for not having identified the problematic authorship change during the review process and for any resulting inconvenience.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2025.122794
