In August 2021, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) published an Article titled “Mechanistic Insight into Copper-Mediated Trifluoromethylation of Aryl Halides: The Role of CuI” by Shen and coworkers. To my astonishment, the article reported obviously wrong data, highly questionable statements and interpretations, and confusing information, with virtually all conclusions being unsupported. It was particularly staggering to see in the publication totally unrealistic X-ray bond distances, dubious kinetic information, and poor presentation of most of the NMR spectra. In my view, the work was bad to the extent of being unsuitable for publication in any scientific journal, let alone strictly peer-reviewed JACS. For my credentials to evaluate research in the area, see here.

Having thoroughly scrutinized the article, I sent, on Nov. 30, 2021, my detailed critique to Prof. Qilong Shen, the corresponding author on the paper, Prof. Erick M. Carreira, Editor-in-Chief of JACS (hereafter EiC), and a few Senior/Associate JACS Editors who I thought might have handled the manuscript and accepted it for publication.

After a sequence of events triggered by the submission of my unsolicited review back in 2021, a Correction to the article was published in JACS in August 2022. Simultaneously, the open access original Supporting Information (pdf), including the X-ray diffraction data (cif), was replaced with the new one.

With just a few exceptions, all of my comments were merely ignored in the Correction, as demonstrated, point by point, in this document. Of those few exceptions, only one comment was addressed more or less adequately. A more detailed analysis of the changes made in the correction note is presented on this page of the current website.

It is hard for me to see how the Correction makes Shen's report publishable in a scholarly journal. In fact, I could not see right from the start how publishing a correction could eliminate numerous grave problems with this fundamentally flawed paper. Although I had shared my views on the article with EiC (more than once), he was of the opposite opinion. Apparently, EiC and his consultants, including the handling editor and reviewers of the original and correction manuscripts are convinced that Shen's report meets the current standards of JACS, which positions itself as:

"the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society and the world's preeminent journal in all of chemistry and interfacing areas of science"