Throwback to him aimlessly meandering around a Florida Publix in his immediate post-presidency

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

@deevybee.bsky.social @rosewind.bsky.social I finally finished writing a thing. forbetterscience.com/2025/11/25/a...

New COSIG guide!

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.

Discover how fight back against fraudulent research & paper mills? Join speakers Jack Wilkinson & Reese Richardson – experts who have made it their mission to empower the world to fight back against the fakery of paper mills: https://rsc.li/47ysXuD #ChemSky @chemistryworld.com#ChemSky

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

Attended Carmina Burana at the Lyric Opera of Chicago tonight, where I unexpectedly ran into @davidsanderssci.bsky.social !

Economist Nicholas Apergis (h-index=90!) appears to have engaged in large-scale plagiarism. Example: Jebli, Youssef, & Apergis (2019) self-plagiarises Apergis & Payne (2014), which in turn plagiarises Afonso & Rault (2010). Substantial text overlap with no citation. pubpeer.com/publications...

Important new analysis identifying the scope of clinical trials disrupted because of NIH shenanigans. > 74 thousand trial participants affected jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 1/4

An international computing society has begun retracting conference papers for “citation falsification” only months after the sleuth who flagged the suspect articles was convicted for defamation in a lawsuit filed by one of the offending authors.

Behold: the first EDX spectrum labeled with Miller indices! #crystallography #chemsky

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!

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

“The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.”

my latest comfort .jpeg

“The authors have informed the journal that an auditable replacement dataset has been prepared and will be made available to The BMJ. The BMJ will update this notice and make a decision about what post-publication change to the content is needed.” I am not enjoying the implications of this.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Director Bhattacharya "Let's fund emerging investigators" Yeah, who's the idiot running NIH who allowed 15% or few fewer early stage investigators be funded in FY2025 compared to FY2024? (Estimate: The official numbers are not yet available (at least publicly)

These are mill papers. Further reading, @reeserichardson.bsky.social may have more: www.researchgate.net/publication/... ... and hilariously a 'bibliometric' analysis that doesn't mention paper mills: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Reporter @virginiagewin.bsky.social interviewed 19 current and former US federal agency scientists about the science being dismantled at EPA, NOAA, NASA, CDC, NIH, & USGS. They say it's making America unprepared for environmental and public health crises. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A network of peer reviewers in Italy is targeting medical journals, threatening “both the scientific record and patient safety,” a team of researchers including @deevybee.bsky.social report.

"If we are to rebuild our scientific enterprise, we will need the support of the American people, and that means cleaning up our house. Policies to forbid ghostwriting and strong sanctions for researchers who violate those policies would be a good place to start." doi.org/10.1126/scie...

I was on 🇨🇦 CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks last weekend to talk about systematic scientific fraud! Listen to the 18-minute segment here: www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...

A rapidly growing share of letters to journals may be drafted by machines, undetected by editors. Study quantifies recently ‘prolific debutante authors’ who had published no letters before 2022, when ChatGPT debuted. #academicjournals #peerreview @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

"Patients and consumers shouldn’t need a FOIA request to understand whether “FDA authorized” reflects compelling evidence or a device permitted despite serious internal concerns, addressed only through labeling caveats." www.statnews.com/2025/11/02/q...

For others troubled by the exoneration of Hoau-Yan Wang, there's an analysis of the difficulty prosecuting scientific fraudsters at 13:00 in this @bjkspod.bsky.social podcast. I didn't anticipate the role of institutional research integrity offices in manufacturing "reasonable doubts."

my letter to the CEO, President, and COO of Services Corporation International, the owner of Dignity Memorial, which manages the cemetery in which my mom is buried that was being used as an ICE staging ground this afternoon.

Paper mills are far more adaptable than the institutions fighting them. Case in point: after journals started using "anti-plagiarism" software, paper mills started selling access to the same software. See our new letter in PNAS, replying to a letter by Philipp Singer: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Tell Goblin to quit sulking and get busy publishing! 🐈📝

They were already suspended, now they're delisted. Cureus has had an outsized impact on the sheer volume of nonsense research for years, and I wonder if WoS felt like they had a choice. I won't miss it. retractionwatch.com/2025/10/27/e...

‘A new low’: Researchers at Iraqi university must cite colleagues, school journals in papers, @joelving.bsky.social reports

Interesting paper from two Argentinian ecologists applies network analysis (like that used in food webs) to the tangled accusations of blame around the Grenfell Towers disaster.

Pumpkin carving last night.

life/work update: +1 baby, -1 job. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

@miryamnaddaf.bsky.social reports at length for @nature.com about identity verification in scientific publishing and why it is no trivial task (featuring some lovely illustrations): www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Northwestern University Faculty Assembly passes a resolution opposing a “compact” with the Trump administration. The vote was 595 to 4 with 8 abstaining. dailynorthwestern.com/2025/10/20/c...

Another live one: UK design #6477896: "LUNG CANCER DETECTION DEVICE USING CNN", granted 16 October 2025. Come on!

Experts who reviewed the document called the citation requirement “deceptive and despicable” and said it could carry a steep price for the journals involved, one of which is indexed in Scopus.

The scale of imported luxury goods in late antique Britain: 752 ivory rings from 78 sites. In some C5th contexts, 8-15% of graves contained one. Research by Katie Hemer, @hugh-willmott.bsky.social & @rowane.bsky.social. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

"You need an expansive political imagination, one that can anticipate the tyrant’s next move and understand its logic without obeying it." My latest: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/inventing-...

@miryamnaddaf.bsky.social reports in @nature.com on increased volume of applications and decreased success rates for European grants and fellowships across the board. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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

The latest AI-generated nonsense to show up in a "peer-reviewed" article, courtesy of @springernature.com. "lead leercap" "lascif arrseic" "Microsologies of the surface area of an environimental Mesopioroious strucctures"

Today's topic in science integrity is brain injuries and how humans & animals do (or rather, do not) prevent them. First, an investigative essay by James Smoglia and @mumumouse2.bsky.social in @bmj.com on the shaky science behind the Q-collar: www.bmj.com/content/391/...

Results of the replication are in! Chocolate is more desirable than poop: Cohen's d_rm = 6.20, 95%CI [5.63, 6.78] N = 486, two single item 1-7 Likert scales of desirability. w/ @jamiecummins.bsky.social

oh.

Hope to see you there! ICYMI: thousands of design registrations have been sold as “patents” as an explicit ploy for academics to pad their CVs. This is still happening! For example, here's a design registration filed 20 Sep 2025 for "MACHINE LEARNING BASED SECURITY DEVICE FOR CLOUD COMPUTING":