Issue 3 (203)/2025

ALSE and ACS Style
Teixeira da Silva, J.A. Literature that refers to “acid rain” as “corrosive downpour”. Journal of Applied Life Sciences and Environment 2025, 58 (3), 535-539.
https://doi.org/10.46909/alse-583190

AMA Style
Teixeira da Silva J.A. Literature that refers to “acid rain” as “corrosive downpour”. Journal of Applied Life Sciences and Environment. 2025; 58 (3): 535-539.
https://doi.org/10.46909/alse-583190

Chicago/Turabian Style
Teixeira da Silva, Jaime A. 2025. “Literature that refers to “acid rain” as “corrosive downpour”.” Journal of Applied Life Sciences and Environment 58, no. 3: 535-539.
https://doi.org/10.46909/alse-583190

Literature that refers to “acid rain” as “corrosive downpour”

Jaime A. Teixeira Da Silva

Independent researcher, Ikenobe 3011-2, Kagawa-ken, 761-0799, Japan

*Correspondence: jaimetex@yahoo.com

Received: Oct. 01, 2025. Revised: Oct. 29, 2025. Accepted: Nov. 17, 2025. Published online: Dec. 09, 2025

ABSTRACT. When the pH of rainwater is low or acidic, it is referred to as acid rain. The term ‘acid rain’, for example, in climate change or other environmental literature, is an established term. Due to the double synonymisation of two words, ‘acid’ to ‘corrosive’ and ‘rain’ to ‘downpour’, the non-standard term or ‘tortured phrase’ (TP) ‘corrosive downpour’ has arisen in some literature. To better appreciate the volume and extent of this TP, a search (29 October 2025) was performed on Google Scholar, revealing about 132 results. After filtering out duplicates and theses, from among accessible literature, 91 documents published between 2015 and 2024 were examined, including 63 papers, 13 book chapters, and 15 proceedings papers: 65 had a DOI, 58 were open access, and the majority (62 documents) had an affiliation in India. None of the documents have been retracted. The highest incidence of the TP ‘corrosive downpour’ was in documents published by Springer Nature (n = 7). While most (93%) documents had only a few (1–3) instances of this TP, and while a large number (49%) had accrued zero citations as of May 2025, suggesting their lack of practical use for citation, some documents with this TP had high citation counts, suggesting their influence. This TP – a de facto error – would benefit from being corrected in any literature that includes it.

Keywords: air pollution; climate change; education and literacy; environment; error; nomenclature; scientific communication.

INTRODUCTION

When gases such as sulphur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen oxides (NO_x), and others interact – via adsorption – with humidity, and when that translates into precipitation in the form of rainwater, this is referred to as ‘acid rain’ because the pH is usually low (about 4) (Parungo et al., 1987). Acid rain generally has negative effects on plants, microbes, and soil (Zhang et al., 2023). While considerable strides were made to reduce the emission of gases causing acid rain in the last century, particularly among some economically more advanced countries, like the US or EU countries, high greenhouse gas emissions continue to be a challenge in other developing nations where there is high industrialisation (Grennfelt et al., 2020). While this paper does not delve into the details of this fascinating topic, needless to say the term ‘acid rain’ has become well established in the scientific literature over decades and can thus be referred to as environmental jargon. Therefore, any deviations from this term, or misrepresentations of it, would be considered incorrect.

The use of synonymisation software to reduce the incidence of plagiarism or textual similarity, which authors are acutely aware of so as not to commit ethical infractions during publication, is one possible explanation for the emergence of ‘tortured phrases’ (TPs) (Cabanac et al., 2021), which are linguistic misrepresentations of established technical terms or jargon. TPs have been reported in environmental literature, distorting its meaning and thereby reducing the effectiveness of its scientific message (Teixeira da Silva, 2024a). One example is the ‘corrosive acids’, a ‘family’ of TPs in which the word ‘acid’ has been replaced by the synonym ‘corrosive’. Consequently, a plant hormone like gibberellic acid would be represented by the non-existent term ‘gibberellic corrosive’ (Teixeira da Silva, 2024b). Seeking to expand an understanding of this linguistic phenomenon as a function of science communication, this paper focuses on the TP ‘corrosive downpour’, which has emerged from the double synonymisation of two words: ‘acid’ to ‘corrosive’ and ‘rain’ to ‘downpour’.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The Tortured Phrase Detector of the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) (PPS, 2025) and Google Scholar were accessed on 17 May 2025, and verified on 29 October 2025, to detect cases of ‘corrosive downpour’.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

On 29 October 2025, the PPS revealed no results for ‘corrosive downpour’, but Google Scholar revealed approximately 132 results. After removing false positives and duplicates, and excluding results for which full texts were not available for verification, as well as theses and other generic reports, a total of 91 documents published between 2015 and 2024 were examined, including 63 papers, 13 book chapters, and 15 proceedings papers (Suppl. table). Of these, 58 were open access and two (from IntechOpen) were of a unique open-access format (Yamada et al., 2023), while 62 had a digital object identifier (DOI), although not all DOIs are recognised by Crossref.

The country with the highest incidence of this TP was India (62 documents; 68%), while the most frequent publisher was Springer Nature (7); however, there was high heterogeneity in terms of publishers, while the publishers of 10 documents were not entirely clear (marked as ‘Unclear’ in the Suppl. table). While most (93%) documents had only a few (1–3: 72+9+2) instances of this TP, and while a large number (49%) had accrued zero citations as of May 2025, suggesting their lack of practical use via citation, one document (DOI: 10.35940/ijeat.C2123. 0210321) had six instances of this TP, while at least eight other papers had a solid (i.e. ≥10) citation count, suggesting some influence among the readership of these papers. Multiple papers had other TPs of the ‘corrosive’ family, such as ‘nucleic corrosive’, which represents nucleic acid. As of May 2025, none of these documents had been retracted, nor was any corrigendum observed for any of them.

While it is practically impossible to verify the peer-reviewed status of a document, especially if open peer review is not employed (100% of the documents), most, if not all, of the journals, book chapters, and proceedings papers claim on their respective websites to be peer reviewed.

However, if peer review and the editorial screening of submissions had been thorough, then peer reviewers and editors would surely have detected this TP, while copy editors would also have had the responsibility of eliminating it from the final text before these documents were published (Teixeira da Silva, 2024c). The fact that this TP (and some others using the term ‘corrosive’) exists in these documents points to a failure of peer review (or emphasises the absence of peer review) and the editorial quality control of the scientific message.

Wherever possible, these errors should be corrected using some sort of a post-publication corrective mechanism, especially for those journals, publishers, and conference organisers that claim to have such a mechanism.

CONCLUSIONS, FUTURE RESEARCH, AND LIMITATIONS

Expanding earlier findings on TPs and how they are inaccurate linguistic representations of jargon or technical terms in the scientific literature (Teixeira da Silva, 2025), this study examined 91 cases of ‘corrosive downpour’, whose presence in those documents points towards potentially problematic literature where authors may have employed generative AI without any transparent declaration.

This may explain how some indexed journals, such as Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research, have become subject to abuse, including by authors employing paper mills, unethical guest editors, and the presence of TPs, leading to the retraction of hundreds of papers to date (Garrigues, 2025). Given the current prominence of climate change research, environmental researchers would benefit from this study’s findings, alerting them to potentially problematic literature that they might consider carefully before citing. Although this study represents the analysis of only a single TP, there is merit in analysing TP-tainted literature on a TP-by-TP basis, even if other TPs exist within those texts.

A future analysis would benefit from contacting the authors of papers with TPs to inquire about why such terms were used, although such studies are difficult to conduct, as authors may perceive such queries as a challenge to them or their work’s integrity; thus, a scoping probe-like questionnaire in which the journal’s editor is also contacted might be the most neutral way of attempting to appreciate how such TPs came into existence.

This study has additional limitations. Not all of the 132 results revealed by Google Scholar were accessible, and full texts are a prerequisite to verify the presence of TPs and to eliminate false positives. Readers are cautioned that not all DOIs are recognised by Crossref, so the indicated DOIs reflect those indicated in papers or on their websites. Even though Google Scholar was used, it tends to offer a wider appreciation of indexed and grey literature that is impacted by TPs, much more than when prominent databases like Scopus, PubMed, or Web of Science are used.

However, it has been noted that a Google Scholar search captured 92% of Scopus results and 95% of Web of Science results (Martín-Martín et al., 2018), suggesting that for the purpose of this analysis, it was sufficient.

In the future, use of computational linguistic tools or AI-based similarity measures could allow the distortion severity of TPs in this and other TP-containing literature to be quantified.

Funding: There was no external funding for this study.

Author contributions: Conceptualisation, investigation, verification, writing, editing: JATS. AI was not used for any of these functions. The author declares that he has read and approved the publication of the manuscript in this present form.

Data availability statement: All data used can be found in the Supplementary table, at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17659792

Conflicts of interest: There are no conflicts of interest.

REFERENCES

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