You are correct. It is common practice to cite related or peripherally related articles from high-impact journals because "they must be good." Another point: Being involved in academia and research, I have known folks on editorial boards of high-impact journals (Nature, Science, JACS, etc.). Many pander to friends or associates (to include many "collaborators" in China), receiving incentives for accepting submitted manuscripts. General research practices in China are also replete with intellectual theft and a general lack of respect for non-Chinese patents.

They lost me when a) they conflated thermodynamics (specifically entropy) and time-dependence and b) oversimplified/misrepresented entropy as disorder. Thermodynamics is and always will be time-independent. The second law of thermodynamics can be stated many ways: The entropy of the universe is infinitely increasing, or entropy is a state function (depending only on the number of microstates available) that can be reversible or irreversible. However, entropy is often misrepresented for certain systems. For example, myriad chemical processes are ordered and tend to ordered states. Take a salt crystal, which has a necessarily ordered periodic arrangement of atoms. The literature also shows that systems will spontaneously order themselves, rather than tend to disorder.