The THE rankings are a joke. From last year: theprint.in/opinion/somethings-wrong-with-the-world-university-rankings-iisc-should-boycott-it-like-iits-did/2313847/

@cathleenogrady.bwww.science covers the rise of shoddy public health papers for @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

Listening: Agriculture - The Spiritual Sound (released today) agriculturemusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-sp...

I have just left a lengthy Pubpeer comment on the autism/Tylenol study being cited by the Trump administration. There appear to be a number of fairly straightforward errors in the paper. pubpeer.com/publications...

Catching up on a summer backlog: congrats to @reeserichardson.bsky.social, winner of the July PubPeer Award for a comment on a 2024 article in @cp-cellmetabolism.bsky.social pubpeer.com/publications... Reese donated his $1000 prize to @msf.ca and the @elisabethbik.bsky.social Science Integrity Fund

I spoke recently with @sidsrivatsan.bsky.social about scientific integrity. Sid did a fantastic job putting these problems in their historical and societal context. I hope you give the podcast episode a listen! faultlinesessays.substack.com/p/the-con-me...

New PubPeer comment on "Efficacy of oral folinic acid supplementation in children with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial" (Panda et al, 2024). Concerns about significant errors. #folinicacid #leucovorin, #autism pubpeer.com/publications...

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.

In this new ESE Viewpoint, @reeserichardson.bsky.social and Matt Spick help editors identify mass-produced research to reject them at the point of submission, reducing the burden on peer review, and the amount of poor-quality noise introduced to the published literature. doi.org/10.3897/ese....

We are now up to 14 journals! New journals: BMC Anesthesiology BMC Genomics BMC Public Health (30,000+ articles!) Archives are now up to >600K peer review documents for >85K articles. All are available to download on Zenodo! reeserichardson.blog/datasets

If you're a journal or publisher using institutional email addresses to verify the identity of authors or reviewers, you'll want to read this story by @joelving.bsky.social.

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...

Channeling @brendannyhan.bsky.social to ask: “what would you say if you saw this in another country?”

Universities. Rural hospitals. Tech companies. Several sectors are going to be profoundly hurt by this. Not to mention the chaos of the moment as current H1-B owners scramble to get back to the U.S., cancel travel, etc. due to the uncertainty. An absolute mess. As intended.

I think it is likely that Dr. Kuperwasser and Dr. El-Deiry will present misinformation about the SV40 promoter-enhancer in COVID19 vaccines tomorrow at ACIP. I strongly recommend that you read @gorskon.bsky.social’s excellent work on the topic before the fearmongering begins.

This investigation is WILD. Props to @joelving.bsky.social!

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

Thrilled that my paper "Partisan disparities in the funding of science in the United States" with Nic Fishman, @leahrosenstiel.bsky.social, and @dashunwang.bsky.social was published in @science.org today! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

There's been a recent explosion in shoddy, cookie-cutter analysis of large, widely-available public health datasets (think NHANES, the UK Biobank, FAERS, etc). Matt Spick and I offer some advice in our new Viewpoint in European Science Editing: doi.org/10.3897/ese.... More reading material below!

Have now downloaded the full published peer review archives of 11 journals! New journals: BMC Chemistry BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies BMC Microbiology BMC Nursing BMC Plant Biology Download all at reeserichardson.blog/datasets/

"Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause." Ta-Nehisi Coates on Ezra Klein and the willingness of the pundit class to redeem Kirk: www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature FAERS is one of several publicly available datasets being exploited by paper mills, pumping hundreds of often meaningless and sometimes misleading papers into the scientific literature, @katetravis.bsky.social reports.

Just updated: downloadable datasets now include six BMC journals! Added BMC Surgery and BMC Women's Health. #PeerReviewWeek

🎁 A gift for you for #PeerReviewWeek! 🎁 I downloaded >200K peer review reports and author responses for >30K articles in four BMC journals (Cancer, Gastroenterology, Medical Genomics and Medicine). These archives are now publicly available on Zenodo. Go nuts! reeserichardson.blog/2025/09/15/t...

MDPI has updated the withdrawal notice to read "This preprint has unresolved ethical issues concerning ethical oversight, legitimacy of institutional boards, validity of the study design, and potential biases in study interpretation that compromise the overall trust in the research findings."

The "transcriptomic chaos" preprint has been withdrawn by @mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social! See here for more info: reeserichardson.blog/2025/07/28/n...

From filing lawsuits to tracking canceled grants to writing op-eds, here are some scientists pushing back against the Trump administration's cuts to science. Story in @nature.com by @dangaristo.bsky.social @maxkozlov.bsky.social @heidiledford.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

'Article broker' in China trying to hook journal editors with fishy publishing deals @joelving.bsky.social reports for @retractionwatch.com retractionwatch.com/2025/09/08/a...

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!

My favorite part of this story on excellent work by @abalkina.bsky.social and Svetlana Kleiner is when @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social asks the paper mill if they are a paper mill and they respond "it's a secret 😋🙈"

I am at the peer review congress #PRC10 in Chicago! Come find me if you want to chat and/or kick my ass

Our @natcomms.nature.com paper on AI for ARDS detection was just featured in the Chicago Tribune and other places! 📰 🔗 www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/28/a...

TIL: when the modern Elsevier was founded in 1880 by Jacobus George Robbers, they appropriated the name and emblem from the House of Elzevir (famed Dutch publishing family that left the business in 1712) despite the two having no historical link. Access to Medical Knowledge, Groen 2006

Update: ARDA has now removed "Journals" from their website header. www.ardaconference.com/journals/ is still up (for now).

In a rare bit of good news: Northwestern University postdocs just won our NLRB union election! ✊️✊️✊️

Fraudulent science is not about just a few bad apples. @owenb-phd.bsky.social writes for @us.theconversation.com theconversation.com/how-bad-scie...

A beautiful visualization of the state space of puzzles, 11 min of joy, h/t @danlarremore.bsky.social

"Elsevier does not care about the integrity of its catalog" exhibit 1,880

The paper @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @mortenoxe.bsky.social @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social, @smutclyde.bsky.social, and I wrote together on the troubles over at Bioengineered has now officially been published by... Bioengineered! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A paper that combines #peerreview & cheese... what could be better? Answer: writing said paper with @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social & Marie Souliere. Read on to learn how the Swiss Cheese Model could help peer review & #researchintegrity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The weaponisation of published articles. @mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social published this review on cardiopulmonary effects of COVID-19 vaccination. The conclusions of the authors are very clear: "Despite these complications, the risk–benefit analysis still strongly favors vaccination"

This case is absolutely bizarre.

This is rich: following the publication of our study, ARDA has changed its website to include a pop-up disclaimer that they do not guarantee journal publications.

We actually wrote a guide for @cosig.net about checking XRD claims against Scherrer's equation! osf.io/hf7qy

Church is the bigger name but Parrish deserves the headline: "Parrish reported in 2018 that she herself had injections of BioViva’s gene therapy. In 2021, STAT News reported the company sent six dementia patients to Mexico [for] the experimental treatment since it wasn’t approved in the U.S."

PLOS ONE metadata forms the basis of our study's Figure 1. We could only study PLOS ONE because PLOS made this metadata freely available (and in bulk XML, no less)! Information is only useful if it is accessible! plos.org/text-and-dat...

"Yet the incentives to commit fraud continue to outweigh the consequences of being discovered. Measures including a researcher’s number of publications and citations have become powerful proxies for academic achievement,..seen as necessary for building a career." www.economist.com/science-and-...

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...

Ursula Le Guin: “The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade.... Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude.”