What is it about?

Academic misconduct has been becoming a serious problem nowadays. Mistakes appeared in publications are also becoming more severe. The two are related because less and less attention is stressed on the rudiments of science in research community. The wrong method discussed in this work has been used by many researchers and the practice has lasted so long. There are so many works published with the method and such works still appear after we first pointed out the problem in November 2017. Conclusions cannot be sensible if the method used to obtain them is wrong. “Some scientists wondered how a questionable line of research persisted for so long." One way to find mistakes promptly before or after their publications is encouraging a keen interest among researchers in fundamental principles instead of relying heavily on equipment.

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Why is it important?

An active attitude toward the rudiments of science is beneficial in solving scientific problems instead of only making attraction.

Perspectives

By confusing the concepts of lattice node and Wyckoff site in crystal, it is misleadingly claimed that “it is obviously simply impossible to have different environments around two physically distinct but symmetrically equivalent atoms.” In fact, the environments of two chiral positions connected by mirror or inverse operation are different. Diamond lattice is a commonly used phrase to distinguish different forms of cF lattice such as table salt, diamond, and spinel MgAl2O4 . The phrase can be conveniently used for describing structures such as MgCu2 and MgAl2O4 where Mg occupies the points indicated in the “diamond lattice.” There are only 14 Bravais lattices. Thus, not every point in the cell of diamond lattice is a lattice node. In the unit cell of primitive diamond lattice there are two carbon atoms but they are represented by only one lattice node. Relative to translation operation, all the nodes (but not necessarily all the points or atoms) in a lattice have the same environment. The environments of the two carbon atoms in the primitive unit cell of diamond are different even though they are connected by symmetry operations. The same environment for all the lattice nodes in a lattice is an essential principle in the long established Miller Indices. Failure to understand this has led to the redefinition of Miller indices [“In an I-centred cell, the Miller indices of this family of planes are (222), not (111)”], and in turn led to the absolutely wrong claims of unevenly distribution of lattice planes with the same Miller indices in a lattice and different node densities within this family of planes.

Yue Liu
Shenyang Normal University

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This page is a summary of: Characterization microwave absorption from active carbon/BaSmxFe12−xO19/polypyrrole composites analyzed with a more rigorous method, Journal of Materials Science Materials in Electronics, December 2018, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10854-018-0467-1.
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