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

Reverse Image Forensics Challenge: Try to find a unique area in Figure 9 of this recent Scientific Reports paper: 10.1038/s41598-025-17456-6 [Aug 2025] - Annotated by ImageTwin.ai

I invite @acm.org to review their articles with Tortured Phrases dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p... (not the first time I'm doing so, here and on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/posts/guilla...)

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Pest Management forbetterscience.com/2025/07/22/p...

Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. Anyone can do forensic metascience. Anyone can sleuth. That's why we are launching COSIG: the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides, an open source resource for all of the above. cosig.net

This was a tricky one. Not surprised the reviewers hadn't noticed. #ImageForensics

It's actually kinda creative, in a terrible, fraud kind of way...

Honestly, I've been worried about this for a while. There's so much pollution in the literature, it's only a matter of time before people start picking up nonsense like "profound learning" and "irregular woodland" because they *think* it's an accepted term. It's probably happening already...

Tortured phrase of the day: "221B Pastry specialist Road in London"

I knew the ICCCNT 2024 conference proceedings were full of papermill nonsense, but seeing the actual number in the PPS still shocked me. 346 (!!) papers with tortured phrases! Does #IEEE really have zero quality checks? Brief proceedings-level report here: pubpeer.com/publications...

Hey #IEEE, can you explain where your "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at IEEE" page went?! Last week, it was still linked on the front page. Now: It's gone, and the old link goes to "We are sorry, the page you are looking for has been moved or removed." www.ieee.org/about/divers...

I think this is one of the worst cases of machine-"paraphrased" nonsense I've seen yet. This goes beyond #TorturedPhrases and straight into incomprehensible gibberish. (Springer conference paper; not posted to PubPeer yet since the site's having some issues)

Sadly, this one doesn't even stand out from the rest. IEEE publishes some of the top conferences of several fields (CVPR, anyone?), but they are drowned out by a sea of papermill nonsense. Infuriating. In related news, IEEE still hasn't done anything about this: pubpeer.com/publications...

I see the reviewers have been reading this article very carefully... pubpeer.com/publications...

For now, let's start with some of my favorite tortured phrases. These were found in "scientific" articles on machine learning, signal processing, and medicine. Can anyone decipher them without context?

Oh! Hi everyone! 😲 I guess I should start actually posting here, huh?😊