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Erroneous efficiency reports harm organic solar cell research

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Mischaracterization of solar cell power conversion efficiencies and widespread publication of inconsistent data in scientific journals threatens to undermine progress in organic and hybrid photovoltaics research.

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Figure 1: Percentage of investigated publications with reported short-circuit current density (JSC) values smaller than the values expected from the corresponding external quantum efficiency (EQE) measurements (dark green), those with JSC values that are within 20% of the expected value (light green) and those with JSC values more than 20% higher than expected (pink, publications with less than ten citations; red, publications with more than ten citations).
Figure 2: Summary of the investigated publications categorized by the publishing journal (ordered by impact factor, decreasing from top to bottom) and by the deviation of the reported short-circuit current density (JSC) compared with calculations of JSC based on the external quantum efficiency (EQE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jonas Weickert and Lukas Schmidt-Mende are in the Department of Physics, Eugen Zimmermann, Phillipp Ehrenreich, Thomas Pfadler, James A. Dorman, University of Konstanz, 78457 Constance, Germany,

    Eugen Zimmermann, Philipp Ehrenreich, Thomas Pfadler, James A. Dorman, Jonas Weickert & Lukas Schmidt-Mende

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  1. Eugen Zimmermann
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  2. Philipp Ehrenreich
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  3. Thomas Pfadler
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Correspondence to Lukas Schmidt-Mende.

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Zimmermann, E., Ehrenreich, P., Pfadler, T. et al. Erroneous efficiency reports harm organic solar cell research. Nature Photon 8, 669–672 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2014.210

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