Vegetos
(An International Journal of Plant Research & Biotechnology)
“Corrosive” acids, inaccurate forms of salicylic, jasmonic, gibberellic and abscisic acids, in the plant literature
*Article not assigned to an issue yet
Research Articles | Published: 26 December, 2023
Online ISSN : 2229-4473.
Website:www.vegetosindia.org
Pub Email: contact@vegetosindia.org
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Keywords:
Databases, Errors, Indexing, Phytohormones, Plant stress, Precision, Signaling
Abstract
The growth of plants is impacted by the existence of biotic and abiotic stresses, and as a way to modulate such stresses, the plant produces signaling molecules and hormones, such as salicylic acid (SA), jasmonic acid (JA), abscisic acid (ABA), which themselves might interact individually, or synergistically with hormones such as gibberellic acid (GA3) or indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), to reduce the impact of that stress, in a bid to stabilize or improve plant growth. The literature on these signaling molecules is vast, and complex. There is thus a need to ensure the accuracy of terminology in plant stress- and plant growth-related literature. This paper documents the existence of papers that represent these compounds (i.e., SA, JA, ABA, GA3, and IAA) inaccurately, as false-positive terms or ‘tortured phrases’, in each case the word “acid” apparently having been replaced by the term “corrosive”. Using Google Scholar, Problematic Paper Screener, Scopus and Web of Science searches (4–16 February, 2023), an attempt was made to identify papers or book chapters containing one or more of these ‘tortured phrases’ of SA, JA, ABA, GA3, and/or IAA. A total of 91 texts were identified, including a mixture of papers with and without a valid Crossref-recognizable digital object identifier (DOI), grey literature without DOIs, open access and not. Most cases (61/91; 67%) were related to plant science. Given that authors are generally free to cite any literature they deem as pertinent with little editorial interference, making any of these papers citable, one risk is that unsuspecting students or non-specialists might use these ‘tortured phrases’, rather than the established terms SA, JA, ABA, GA3, and IAA.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Serhii Nazarovets (Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Kyiv, Ukraine) for assistance with Scopus and Web of Science searches, and for collecting the full texts of some difficult-to-access results.
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