We argue that the so-called succinate L-lysinium 1 (Kalaivani et al. (2015) [16], zinc chloride doped L-lysinium succinate 2 (Kalaivani et al. (2015) [17], L-threonine phthalate 3 (Elberin Mary Theras et al. (2015) [18] and sodium acetate doped I.-tyrosine 4 (Arthi et al. (2015) [19] are all dubious crystals. Taking compounds 1-4 as examples we show that EDAX is an inappropriate method for characterization of new materials based on elemental composition data. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.