Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.bsky.social

Something fishy about this figure🥁Scientific Reports September 2025. pubpeer.com/publications...

Looking forward to a @retractionwatch.com EXCLUSIVE ! retractionwatch.com/2025/01/02/i... "The program is funded by a generous donation from George Tidmarsh."

A brilliant post on For Better Science by Maarten.

@bmj.com Please look at PubPeer comments on an article you published last week. pubpeer.com/publications... I think your research integrity dept shld act swiftly on this one, given clinical significance. I'm aware of even more evidence of problems so let me know if this is not sufficient.

You may have seen reports about a paper claiming that "Stem cell therapy prevents heart attacks": bmj.altmetric.com/details/1830... If so, you might want to grab some popcorn: pubpeer.com/publications...

Sadism, harassment, defamation, academic manipulation and derogatory falsification: Yes, I admit to all of that. But how bloody dare they connecting me to Retraction Watch!!!

"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...

Schneider Shorts 31.10.2025 – Who hasn’t had a biopsy? forbetterscience.com/2025/10/31/s...

Struck me while reviewing (another) terribly faked figure in Scientific Reports that some (but not all) of their problems would be quickly solved if they just insisted authors present image data in an elegant way.

If scholarly publishers pledge to never publish papermill trash... What shall they publish instead, to sustain their business model?

Inclusive: For Better Science is 10 years old now!

Another wonderful diagram of "bacterial mitochondria", this time from Scientific Reports in 2025. The whole paper is fake, but the diagram is still delightful. pubpeer.com/publications...

Happy to share a new peer-reviewed study on PubMed. Blessing eggs creates bigger and tastier chickens (p < 0.001). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41035978/

Science Family journals use Proofig for image duplication detection. In January, Holden said they'd only documented 23 problems out of the last 2000 papers scanned, impressive! I downloaded the last 80 papers from Science Advances and found this published 2 days ago.

Recent MDPI paper including diagram of a bacterial cell with a mitochondrion 🤦‍♀️ The authors propose a mechanism for the toxicity of silver nanoparticles: "Ag+ ions in AgNPs bombard the bacterial mitochondria’s electron transport chain, resulting in cell death".

A CRO has been scamming academic and industry labs in the US with fraudulent data that has been published in Nature and other high impact journals. Leonid has written a great piece on my findings: forbetterscience.com/2025/09/22/i...

In 2024 I cycled from the UK to China. I finally finished a vlog, so here it is if you'd like to watch it. It's a glorified holiday album with some complaints and maps 😂 youtu.be/MdgHZPfivVA

I have been blogging at For Better Science. Revisiting Queen's University in Belfast: forbetterscience.com/2025/09/16/f...

Even in 2024 and 2025 after so much scandal there are still name brand labs publishing photoshopped neuroscience images...

This is bad news. Shooting people whose views we disagree with can only take us in a terrible direction.

Yes, I really marked every duplication of a particle in this SEM image. It might have taken me longer than it took them to fake it... Khan et al. 2017 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jallcom.2016.11.260) This Elsevier article is a complete clown show... pubpeer.com/publications... #ImageForensics

Harvard researchers publishing in Nature, some encouragement for those suffering imposter syndrome. pubpeer.com/publications...

A Cuban article on Carlo Croce @OhioState . It doesn't get all the facts correct, but it does include an image of @smutclyde.bsky.social @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social @forbetterscience.bsky.social @elisabethbik.bsky.social www.juventudtecnica.cu/articulos/fr...

They use the artwork of @smutclyde.bsky.social I commissioned from @sholtodavid.bsky.social ! forbetterscience.com/2023/10/09/c...

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...

"The Committee extends its profound gratitude to Professor Andrew George, who has chosen not to renew his role as co-chair, for his valuable contributions and leadership." ukcori.org/2025/06/13/u... Because nobody reads FBS, right? forbetterscience.com/2025/02/10/a...

Kalam et al. 2017 (DOI: 10.1016/j.msec.2017.03.088) were not happy with the low number of larger particles in their SEM image, so they just duplicated a section of it. They rotated it so it's not very obvious to the reader. Peak science in Materials Science and Engineering C! #ResearchIntegrity

Sulistiawati et al. 2022 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpharm.2022.122327) were a bit too honest in their data availability statement. The paper seems completely made-up to me... Of course this didn't stop Elsevier from publishing it! pubpeer.com/publications...

Retracted yesterday by Dove Press (now T&F) - fair enough, it does seem beyond saving. I identified this with a large scale (semi) automated screen of T&F papers. It was then helpfully animated by ImageTwin.ai.

These IR spectra from an MDPI paper certainly look hand drawn to me, but how to describe exactly what is wrong with it? doi.org/10.3390/phar...

Published in "Smart Medicine" 2025. The authors used three cell lines to study HCC. None of these are HCC cell lines. Two of them are known to be HeLa since 2017. Last author at @stonybrooku.bsky.social

No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot guess the journal withe the highest “impact factor” in organic chemistry last year. Really. Nor will you guess many of the other “winners”:

I Lost My Pancreas in Heidelberg forbetterscience.com/2025/08/12/i...

Graphical Abstracts are my passion 08 Aug 2025 ($3090.00 APC)

A week ago I was crazy enough to email a paper's corresponding author for the data. No response. "The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request." Why is this data availability statement evil? A few reasons: ...

Retraction by ‪@mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social‬ of a paper in which a University of West Florida professor appears to have photoshopped his model airplane into a photo of a NASA wind tunnel mdpi.com/2226-4310/7/... pubpeer.com/publications...

Paper published on 06 August 2025 in Nature. Day after publication, I asked about a western blot. Author misunderstands my question, says it will take "a couple of weeks" to share the experimental repeats promised in the manuscript. Why is that data not close to hand?! pubpeer.com/publications...

A new blog, written together with @academic-integrity.bsky.social

“Rather than filing lawsuits and hiding behind carefully crafted statements, the scientific community should be engaging in a conversation about problems and potential solutions.” Holden Thorp writes in Science.

Springer Nature and others have published dozens of papers by Egyptian and Saudi researchers with totally fabricated comet assay images. I have written about these papers here, and provided some tips on how to identify these problematic images: forbetterscience.com/2025/06/24/c...

Image forensics you laugh, you lose edition. Presented exactly how it appears in the paper. I did not adjust the brightness or contrast. pubpeer.com/publications...

Iran-Man of Sussex and Wonder-Woman of Amsterdam forbetterscience.com/2025/06/03/i...

Frontiers issued a correction to one of the papers in this swamp of Italian fraud. The "corrected" figure still contains duplicated images. At what point would you simply lose faith? @frontiersin.bsky.social pubpeer.com/publications...

Sixth retraction for the lab of Professor Guang-Xian Zhang at Thomas Jefferson University - but no action by the university? HT: @smutclyde.bsky.social pubpeer.com/publications...

Based on the outcomes of our project, we have created a pamphlet designed to be used in research laboratories. #researchintegrity #researchclimate #researchmisconduct

Truly baffling from the "excellent team" at Scientific Reports. What further explanation is required beyond what the PubPeer link says? "Unexpected overlapping areas between images that should show different experimental conditions. I've added the coloured rectangles to show where I mean."

Retraction May 27, 2025. Another one bites the dust from Martin Birchall and Alex Seifalian, UCL Ear Institute. HT @sholtodavid.bsky.social and @elisabethbik.bsky.social

A 2016 paper from UCL researchers has been retracted. The paper includes photoshopped microscopy images. Two of the authors (Martin Birchall and Alexander M. Seifalian) were involved in the Macchiarini trachea transplant catastrophe. Seifalian manufactured transplants, Birchall performed surgeries.

Well, I was hoping to learn so much about the interaction network by examining this spiderweb, but there are no names. Scientific Reports working hard to add value to scientific publishing in 2025.