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.

Will no-one think of the harmed statues?

It never occurred to me that papermillers would *illuminate the circuit diagrams* in their garbage papers, but of course they do. Life continues to imitate 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'.

Why change the habits of a lifetime?

The most Estonian Whackyweedia entry EVAH. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaan_T%...

Please admire the poison-pen stylings of one Matthew Stephenson, using a sock-puppet to whine about noms-de-guerre while trying to get my coauthors sacked. forbetterscience.com/2024/05/29/w... I can handle "irrelevant hillbilly", but "drunken"?! Alcohol misuse is part of my Danish cultural heritage!

So I passed another tourist walking tour in Helsinki.

Grab the beers, people! They're sliding off the table again! Whose idea was it to uninvent perspective?

Gdansk has a history of allegorical public art & architecture decoration, portraying various civic virtues, so it makes perfect sense to come across a fountain devoted to dick hygiene.

Just another 'Adoration of the Shepherds' scene. Except there's a pixy inna red cap playing the bagpipes.

New t-shirt plan: "I'm here to memorise paintings and drink beer, and the bad news is, the art museum has closed for the night."

In which a Springer executive bravely speaks up on behalf of the underdog & defends the papermills who want to go on papermilling.

Must credit FBS commenter MJW for introducing me to the existence of francium perovskites. forbetterscience.com/2025/07/08/t... pubpeer.com/search?q=%28...

Image duplication! Clearly one version has been cut down, and there are slight differences but I attribute those to compression artifacts.

Don't be paranoid. Of course the 1880s Polish realist / romantic horses aren't talking about you.

With additions and tinkering up to the last moment.

Time for a reminder that the religion that invented the antisemitic Blood Libel also invented the special olive press for squeezing out every drop from the jesus to assuage the vampiric cravings of its ruling-class worshippers.

I have no idea why these cherubim (or putti, or whatever) are wearing little fur-suits. They don't look comfortable. But I don't judge.

No, Wiley, I am not a health-care professional but I read the retraction notice anyway. Will I be arrested?

(1/x) I have been focusing on image integrity for most of last year, but manipulated images are not the only aspect by which "scientists" cheat the system. I have been looking more into citation fraud recently so I thought I would present a case-study to showcase some of the common patterns:

A great example of the Clown Car citation style.

🎧 We are happy to announce that Season 2 of our podcast "Science in the Grey Zone is now out! 🔎 In this season, we interviewed 17 sleuths at the “Scientific Literature Decontamination” symposium held in Paris in September 2024. 🔗 open.spotify.com/episode/7j8Y...