Do you know what to do when a study you have cited gets retracted? COSIG's entry on Citations to Retracted Publications has been updated with what to do in this situation. Read all about it: osf.io/9q3as

Pseudoreplication is the practice of treating non-independent observations as if they were independent replicates. This can dramatically increase the rate of false positives. COSIG's newest entry covers how to spot them. Read it at osf.io/hyxvr COSIG 🎉now with 34 guides 🎉is available at cosig.net.

@sjmelchor.bsky.social writes for @nature.com about how to spot dubious papers, interviewing @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @abalkina.bsky.social, @jabyrnesci.bsky.social, myself and and my fellow @cosig.net maintainers @solalpirelli.bsky.social and Yagmur Ozturk! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Stealth corrections happen when a publisher makes changes to a scientific article after its publication, without issuing any public notice. To learn more, check out the latest COSIG entry on Stealth Corrections! osf.io/34nj5 COSIG (33 guides and growing!) is available at cosig.net.

New blog post: UnEDXpected Peaks Thanks to @reeserichardson.bsky.social, for teaching me to spot Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy problems. @cosig.net guide: osf.io/2kdez/files/... 30+ papers from a group from Pakistan with wonky EDX plots. Read more: scienceintegritydigest.com/2026/02/09/u...

To make COSIG more discoverable for educators looking to develop course material on publication integrity and peer review, COSIG now has an entry in OER Commons! @oercommons.bsky.social #OER oercommons.org/courses/the-...

Check out this feature on sleuthing by @jgro-the.bsky.social !

Happy New Year from Sal Sleuthmander and the COSIG team! Here's to doing lots of post-publication peer review in 2026 🎆🥂🔎

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from COSIG's newly-named mascot, Sal Sleuthmander!

Last week, COSIG's team of maintainers finally got to meet up in person! @solalpirelli.bsky.social @reeserichardson.bsky.social

Achal Agrawal realised how ingrained research misconduct had become, and resolved to do something about the issue He is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025 go.nature.com/3Yk3d0T

Are you keeping up with @abalkina.bsky.social's advent calendar? It is a great way to practice spotting publication integrity issues!

Congratulations to one of COSIG's first contributors, @elisabethbik.bsky.social !

Happy Advent! !!!🎄✨ Welcome to a new edition of the Research Integrity Advent Calendar. Each day brings a small challenge: spot the problem, detect inconsistencies, and sharpen your skills. Enjoy the season and the daily puzzles! Day 1. papermills.tilda.ws/advent2025

This Thursday, COSIG maintainer @reeserichardson.bsky.social will be presenting on using COSIG to spot problematic papers! Registration details below.

Scientific articles often report data in tables. COSIG's latest guide covers methods to export these tables into a spreadsheet editor like Microsoft Excel! COSIG (32 guides and growing!) is available at cosig.net.

COSIG has a new mascot but he doesn't yet have a name! Any suggestions?

Check out the latest issue of REACH magazine from @sci-integrity.com, which features COSIG on page 42! www.sci-integrity.com/reach-octobe...

The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS) is useful for identifying potential adverse events associated with drugs. However, its data is often exploited to produce articles reporting spurious drug risks. COSIG's entry on formulaic research now covers low-quality pharmacovigilance studies!

COSIG has a new landing page! Check it out at cosig.net. (Files for COSIG are still hosted on OSF!)

What is a "calculation chain" file? How can I easily identify duplicated values in a table? COSIG's 31st guide is all about data forensics using Microsoft Excel! osf.io/bz725 As always, all guides are available at cosig.net.

Adjusting the black/white levels in an image can reveal inconsistencies barely perceptible to the naked eye. A 2018 article in Scientific Reports was just retracted as a result of several such inconsistencies. Check out COSIG's guide on software for image forensics here: osf.io/g23pf

Starting in 10 minutes!

This Friday, September 12, COSIG maintainer @reeserichardson.bsky.social will be participating in a panel discussion (16:00 CEST, 10:00 AM EDT) as part of the all-day event "Making Sense of Open Science" hosted by the Czech Academy of Sciences. Watch online! www.projekt-amulet.cz/index.php/en...

Here we are!

COSIG maintainers Reese Richardson and Yagmur Ozturk are at #PRC10 in Chicago! Come find us to talk about post-publication peer review!

Stocking the Librarian’s Publishing Integrity Toolkit The number of tools available to help library staff identify potential research misconduct is rapidly expanding. Here are some recommendations. By Matthew Goddard and Zachariah Motts katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

Want to get involved finding problematic scientific articles? Check out the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides at cosig.net! @cosig.net

One of the issues raised in this commentary is data leakage between the training set and the validation set. Check out COSIG's entry on data leakage here: osf.io/d8mzb

On Monday, July 21 at @reeserichardson.bsky.social will be giving a talk about COSIG for Open Research Summer School, organized by @kingsioppn.bsky.social! Online attendance for all of Open Research Summer School is free! Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-resea...

Our entry on reporting publication integrity issues to publishers has contact information to reach the publication integrity and publication ethics departments at most major scholarly publishers. Read here: osf.io/4edk2 All of COSIG is available at cosig.net!

A 2019 Cochrane systematic review on using lithium to treat acute mania confuses standard error (SE) with standard deviation (SD) for two studies included in a meta-analysis, resulting in an overestimation of overall effect size in that meta-analysis. See COSIG's guide on the topic: osf.io/hp4yd

"Data leakage" occurs when a statistical or machine learning model has access to data it shouldn't during the training process. This can lead to severe overestimation of a model's predictive performance. Data leakage is the subject of COSIG's 30th guide! Read here: osf.io/d8mzb

A recent article on preventing solar cells from overheating using nanoparticles presents this TEM image. However, this image contains apparent duplications. Can you spot them? Answers in PubPeer thread below. See COSIG's guide on image duplication: osf.io/547re

Anyone can help safeguard science🔎💡 That's the spirit behind COSIG, a brilliant, community-led #OpenScource project that empowers anyone to take part in post-publication peer review, or #Sleuthing Huge congrats to the team behind it🎉 We'll be recommending it widely! #ResearchIntegrity

Do you want to take part in post-publication peer review but have no idea where to start? COSIG's newest guide covers exactly this, going over some basics and suggestions on how to get started with PPPR/forensic metascience/sleuthing! cosig.net "Getting started" guide: osf.io/8m2tz

A recent article on memory-related gene expression has been repeatedly critiqued for a lack of multiple hypothesis correction, which increases the likelihood of false positives. See COSIG's entry on multiple hypothesis correction here: osf.io/csxd5

Check out coverage of COSIG in @chemistryworld.com!

Can you spot any issues with this published FTIR spectrum? One answer below...🧵

Awesome implementations of GRIM by @lhdjung.bsky.social and @lukaswallrich.bsky.social

If you asked four people their age in years, the average of their ages could only ever end in .0, .25, .50 or .75. This is the principle underlying GRIM (Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means), now covered in a new guide for COSIG's first official update! cosig.net GRIM guide: osf.io/67bp4

@cosig.net coverage in Nature news! Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Read up on COSIG in Miryam Naddaf's coverage for @nature.com! doi.org/10.1038/d415...

COSIG is an open source project sustained by community contributions. Have suggestions, feedback or ideas for new guides? Open an issue on the GitHub repo (github.com/cosig-pppr/cosig), email [email protected], or let us know here! What would you like to see included in COSIG? #ScienceIntegrity

Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS/EDX/EDAX) is a popular technique in materials science for analyzing the elemental composition of samples. Check out COSIG's EDX guide here: osf.io/shfjy Can you spot any issues with this EDX spectrum? Answers in the alt text.

#ImageForensics Can you spot something unexpected here? It's a supplemental figure from a @plos.org PLOS Genetics paper. Become an image sleuth yourself, by reading this appropriate @COSIG.net guide: osf.io/547re

‘Anyone can do this’: Sleuths publish a toolkit for post-publication review The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG) aims to make “post-publication peer review” more accessible Project headed by @reeserichardson.bsky.social @cosig.net retractionwatch.com/2025/06/04/c...

I wish there was a library of resources on research integrity methods and resources... Oh! Look.... 👍👏

A very important initiative. it's useful for all scientists to be aware of what kind mistakes and fraud can be found in scientific papers when one reads them, cites or peer reviews.

This looks like a really helpful resource. In our lab reading group this week, we read @abalkina.bsky.social & @deevybee.bsky.social's paper on paper mills (www.proquest.com/openview/055...). Qs came up about what to do if you spot something questionable, so this is a nice follow-up. #OpenScience