The publishers of Frontiers are very proud of their fraud-detection software and have appointed themselves as "Guardians of Research Integrity". Also, they publish stuff like this.

1. Aotearoa New Zealand friends and colleagues 🇳🇿, Logistics for my February trip are coming together. I'd love to meet more of you and/or talk with groups of interested colleagues about AI course and teaching in a ChatGPT world (thebullshitmachines.com). Right now, my schedule is as follows:

Pompous idiots are *always* a joking matter!

And here are both David (Smut Clyde on X/Hoya campingear on PubPeer) and Kevin (Cheshire on X/Actinosome thing-or-other on PubPeer) sharing a 🍻; we will again. Together we’ve posted comments on ~40,000 papers, including retraction notices to make the database more useful. Re: x.com/SciGuardians...

Imagine my delight to discover that one of the artists who designs cans for Garage Project beers is a fan of Musrum (Earnshaw & Thacker 1968).

The References had a seizure and started speaking Qwghlmian.

@spottingthespot.bsky.social Merry $mas! pubpeer.com/publications...

I am brimming with holiday spirit

One more bookish set for good measure. These biscuits are inspired by the weird and wonderful world of medieval illustration.

I have much better than yours

We see a new phenomenon. Fake authors in papers with hundreds of citations. Papers are easy to produce by ChatGPT. Even if a paper is retracted, no punishment to the real authors, but citations still count. Today's puzzle is about a similar case papermills.tilda.ws/2025advent4

These are not references. These are what happens when the cat hoiks up a hairball while you are dictating into voice-recognition software.

PRO-TIP: When you ask Chat-GPT to write your paper, *read* the responses before copy-pasting them into the document. pubpeer.com/publications...

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