Can you justify using (and paying for) a service that generates a ready to submit paper with just one prompt? 🧵

📝 Latest Article Commentary Alert! 📝 "Closing the paper mines" @aidybarnett.bsky.social & @jabyrnesci.bsky.social → doi.org/10.1080/0898... #PaperMill #ResearchMisconduct #AI #GenAI #ResearchIntegrity

An outstanding long-read on research integrity and outright lies. It made me gasp out loud. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520... Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

“If fabricated studies make their way into the evidence base, they can mislead real scientists and ultimately slow progress for patients." Published in The BMJ, a new AI tool developed by @aidybarnett.bsky.social and colleagues has exposed the scale of fake studies flooding cancer research.

Everybody loses when research results are changed or supressed. This is an ongoing problem in Australia. As a start, we need a conversation between researchers and bureaucrats/lawyers.

Fellowship schemes by Australian funding agencies invite researchers to disclose personal career disruptions to promote equity. But this well-meaning policy can expose private medical details to non-medically trained reviewers and create new risks of bias Read more: buff.ly/BriGjyG

Less is more. This aphorism is constantly on my mind. The scientific publication system is under tremendous strain, the last thing it needs is a massive dump of LLM generated/aided papers. If you love science, then show it some love. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is a statistical blunder that I've never seen before. Excluding zeros and ones because they didn't give a usable number after log-transforming. No idea why they simply didn't add a constant before transforming, or better still use a Poisson model.

A wonderful article from the ABC on Mercy Ships www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

Number of days since I've seen an emu: 0.

A case study on how an Australian government agency changed the results of a qualitative study. Editing or suppressing research findings is not good policy, can lead to harms, and is awful to experience as a researcher. Journal: link.springer.com/article/10.1... OA: eprints.qut.edu.au/262261/

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n... via @statnews.com The complete collapse of the NIH, CDC, and FDA is so tragic and damaging to not only the U.S., but the world... Dark Age 2.0.

I read this excellent book last year about the US coup in Guatemala. So much death and destruction built on lies.

"It might be easy to dismiss the idea of ISO 9001 as just another tool to encourage best practice among publishers. But journal certification would fill a long-standing gap in the chain of external oversight from conduct to translation of research." @jabyrnesci.bsky.social writes in @nature.com !

Swallowtail butterfly in my garden.

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited?

"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?" The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."

Holiday

Rather than investing in the energy that "will never kill us or never run out" (Will Self) our state government is pouring money into coal. A sad short-term gamble to win votes.

Was a preprint, now a paper. Our experiment on researchers preferences for published papers. Disappointingly, the journal impact factor still dominates, and even worse, some authors are willing to sacrifice their results for a higher impact factor. www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docum...

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited? Version of record at @elife.bsky.social. Thorough and useful peer review - who needs and impact factor?! Links to paper and code/data ⬇️ 📄https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/108748 💻https://github.com/agbarnett/cited_reviewers

Bloom

At a repair cafe getting a music stand fixed and it is an absolute joy of positivity and community spirit.

🎈 Time flies! Exactly one year ago today @rorinstitute.bsky.social and @aimosinc.bsky.social launched MetaROR, a platform to publish metaresearch through the publish-review-curate approach. Over the course of the year, we published 28 articles reviewed by 59 different reviewers. [1/3]

Bloom!

At the past two AIMOS conferences, we have had a free public lecture for the local community. #AIMOS2025 follows suit! Join us for Ivan Oransky's public lecture: events.humanitix.com/public-talk-... but do so soon, seats are limited!

International Research Integrity Conference: it's underway in Sydney. Opening Sunday workshop by James Heathers on Forensic Metascience. Full program available: researchintegrityconf.com Thank you sleuths!

New paper: we validated the Clinical Frailty Scale for predicting 90-day mortality in frail older adults. We show that the scale's predictive utility is low, but argue that mortality risk shouldn't be what catalyses end-of-life care discussions anyway doi.org/10.1136/bmjo... #statsky #medsky #episky

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

The Qld police are catching fewer badly behaving motorists, but yet they still find time to fine cyclists for speeding on the bike path. I saw four officers doing this a few months ago. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

Have increased capacity for this December INSPECT-SR online training workshop following a successful 1st event today. Book here: www.trybooking.com/uk/FKHV

Glad to share our full paper on why deployed clinical prediction models should not discard predicted risks in favour of thresholds with @rexwp.bsky.social and @aidybarnett.bsky.social now up on @jclinepi.bsky.social. A brief explainer (1/4): #statsky #rstats authors.elsevier.com/a/1m1D83BcJQ...

🎲 Working in a bingo hall as a boy, #AusHSI Prof @aidybarnett.bsky.social is well-versed in the game of chance. In @significancemag.bsky.social, learn about the #lottery for #researchfunding he now runs for the @britishacademy.bsky.social and how it works. 🔗 bit.ly/3J7689t | 🔓 bit.ly/47HTlDH

My dog loves sleeping in a pot plant

The dark truth behind FormatMyPaper.com

With only about 10 spots left, #AIMOS2025 will almost surely sell out this year. Register now to make sure you don't miss out! aimos-inc.github.io/aimos.confer...

Some real fake news! Paper mills are creating fake authors who can then serve as fake reviewers. The illustration of the fake reviewer sitting at their desk is excellent. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

👉Also Sorbonne bsky.app/profile/sorb... pulled out of 'THE' University Ranking 👇 Important step in times of massive, systematic gaming by Universities, being a main incentive for Hyperprolific Publishing, Citation Cartels, Paper Mills & Junk Science! #researchintegrity, #Chemsky, #CompChemSky

Is it fair for grant reviewers — who are often our colleagues — to judge the legitimacy of career breaks due to personal circumstances? go.nature.com/48yaJvF

A good argument for preprinting everything here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I once worked in a bingo hall and saw the joy of people winning money at random. Now I randomise academics in the serious business of who wins research funding. With funding lotteries growing in popularity, I reflect on how to run them and the lessons from bingo. academic.oup.com/jrssig/artic...

I think a lot about the general lack of statistical competence. Misspelling the great John Tukey's name as Turkey may seem harmless, but I can't think of how anyone whose is serious about statistics would do this.

2025. (not just cancer lit....) Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? A large language model scans abstracts and titles for signs that an article was produced by a 'paper-mill' company. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Lotteries may be fair in theory, but new research shows people prefer expert committees to decide who gets scarce medical treatment.

Free data resources in science are having the shit mined out of them to produce X,000's of bullshit papers. What should we do? (Warning: I sat on this draft for too long, and publishers are already doing some of it. That's what I get for engaging with the news.) open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

At last, a simple diagram that explains random forests. Go forth and make random diagrams, I mean random forests. From www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejo...

It's 2025.723 and scientists are still putting too many decimal places in their results.

When the zombie apocalypse starts in Brisbane

Peer reviewers are more likely to recommend accepting papers that cite their work — my latest for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/policy/publi... @aidybarnett.bsky.social