Ah, passive voice... is there anything that can't be done by it? link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Rate your score on Factor Fexcectorn. Well done, Scientific Reports. pubpeer.com/publications...

@deevybee.bsky.social @rosewind.bsky.social I finally finished writing a thing. forbetterscience.com/2025/11/25/a...

So red wine does *not* cure erectile dysfunction after all. I am disappoint. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The authors failed to cite Judge Dredd. Unacceptable. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Fribourg Declaration forbetterscience.com/2025/11/17/t...

@retractionwatch.com One for your Confabulated References archives.

I did enjoy @scalzi.com's cheerful disinclination to identify his narrator / protagonist as male or female. "Does it matter? You choose! Which do you prefer?" To the annoyance, I am sure, of readers who think that clearly gendering the characters is part of an author's job description.

This is *not* how to plagiarise text by asking Chat-GPT to paraphrase it.

One of the first papermills was 'MedChina' - a Dr Jia-Li Liu - following a template to churn out fake meta-analysis papers. forbetterscience.com/2022/06/07/t... 12 years too late, the editors of Gene finally got around to checking the .doc metadata of the manuscript. pubpeer.com/publications...

So I thought that Elsevier was already as enshittified as possible. I was wrong.

Starting a petition to replace the word 'palindrome' with 'palinilap'.

"Additionally, the author stated that they have used AI tools for generating some images, including Fig. 1." Reviewers and editors could not work that out for themselves. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy Birthday!

Today I realised that the 'Madonna in the Dry Tree' was a stock image, and the original owner of the version in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum didn't want to pay Petrus Christus to paint a legitimate copy, which is why it's adorned with the little 'A's of the Alamy watermark.

The editors of ACS Omega cheerfully accepted the authors' excuses and replacement image for this weird shit. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... H/t Leonid @forbetterscience.bsky.social

"You left two witnesses."

Have they tried *paying* them?

EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH GOOGLY EYES

Me [serving a sachet of wet food for the feline overlords]: If this is pronounced 'sashey', a small axe is a 'hatshey'. Fraud Doktorin: [picks up the Frying Pan of Loving Correction]

I grieve to report that this absolute mantlepiece of text engarblement has been depublished. Along with 13 others from the same thoroughly fraudulent Special Issue. pubpeer.com/publications... I included it in this report from the fake-science economy: forbetterscience.com/2024/06/17/r...

PRO-TIP: You don't have to copy-paste *everything* from the Chatbot response straight into your scholarly manuscript.

If you're looking for a nice thing to say about a zombie friend, "She looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth" is generally true. Except on hot days.

Keep fish and seals and cetaceans out of the sea - they injure the pollutants.

If Ilka knows about FBS, surely she must have searched for maths papermills? Like this from 2020, by @smutclyde.bsky.social : forbetterscience.com/2020/06/15/b...

Not really.

time lapse of Janine receiving her baby spinach leaf

Disappointingly, NOT a sequel to 'The Little Mole who knew it was None of His Business'.

When analysing the length of beaver dams, you have to use a log scale

1/2 Papermillers: Here's a half-arsed manuscript with theoretical predictions & "practical applications" for a material that's way too radioactive to ever be synthesised. Half the citations are purchased (to benefit the buyers' academic stats). It will be published anyway because we own the editors.

Tfw you pay full price for a papermill manuscript and then discover that the scrivener couldn't be arsed making any effort, and simply recycled a paragraph from a half-written Special Issue Editorial for a completely different topic. pubpeer.com/publications...

ChatGPT, write me a manuscript about quantum technology - but in the style of Von Deyen's albums. pubpeer.com/publications... Pubpeerified by Jian Peng Chan.

When I said that "People being shot is a price I am willing to pay for the freedom to shoot people", obviously I meant *other* people.

Apparently university students are livestock. No wonder the authors prefer "sustainable e-learning" to the old-school lecture-hall model of education. www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15...

@briandeer.com Sound familiar? Comments by @kathleenseidel.bsky.social published 08/2//2025. Likely relevant to last week's disaster at the CDC, i.e. www.reuters.com/business/hea... Please boost :)

TIL about the scarcity of Monet paintings, on account of the destruction of most of his work. 10.1109/access.2023.3337430

This is what happens when you entrust a chatbot with the task of writing your paper about the Chimp Optimization Algorithm and the Evolutionary Programming Algorithm. doi.org/10.1109/acce...

"Meanwhile, Fig. 8 shows the Pareto front diagram obtained by the MATLAB software based on objective functions." Energy Reports is a Very Serious Journal. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@gcabanac.cpesr.fr Phrase torturing? 10.1039/d2ra03218j

24 papermill products, a-hanging on the wall And if one papermill product, should accidentally fall There'll be 23 papermill products, a-hanging on the wall. www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1... pubpeer.com/publications...

I have so many questions.

Today's bestiary-themed optimiser-algorithm fiddle-faddle was presumably inspired by the opening scenes in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. It could only be improved by Ligeti background music while reading it. pubpeer.com/publications... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fireworks. Earthworks. Waterworks. Gasworks. Woodworks. Paperworks. For any X, if 'Xworks' is a word, then X is an Element.

The paper @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @mortenoxe.bsky.social @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social, @smutclyde.bsky.social, and I wrote together on the troubles over at Bioengineered has now officially been published by... Bioengineered! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Bhattarcharya is one of a cohort of dickweeds who lack the basic skill of *admitting that they were wrong*. forbetterscience.com/2024/02/12/r...

Authors were unable to replicate the alchemical transmutation of palladium into silver. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I cannot look away from this fake, totally nonsensical Figure - part of a supposedly reviewed, supposedly edited paper in IEEE Access. Well done, University of Bremen! "The APC was funded by the Open Access Initiative of the University of Bremen and the DFG via SuUB Bremen."

We'll give you the details of how we obtained our results WHEN YOU SERVE US WITH THE SUB-POENA.