"Compromised science" news/opines (includes retractions, declining academic standards, pred-J, etc)

Europe’s largest paper mill? 1,500 research articles linked to Ukrainian network
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02809-y

An investigation has identified more than 1,500 research articles produced by a network of Ukrainian companies that could be one of Europe’s largest paper mills — businesses that produce fake or low-quality research papers and sell authorships...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Trump called for ‘gold-standard science’: how the NIH, NSF and others are answering
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02770-w

US science agencies have begun releasing their plans to comply with US President Donald Trump’s call for ‘gold-standard science’. The plans mainly detail efforts towards achieving widely supported science goals, such as data accessibility and reproducibility. But researchers and science-policy specialists tell Nature that elements of the plans leave the door open to political interference in science...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Universities, journals, regulators all have a role in identifying scientific misconduct.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/31/opinion/research-misconduct-funding

President Trump’s administration has launched a series of attacks on American higher education institutions, many of them of dubious legality and tainted by politics. It’s quite ironic, then, that in one area where universities really would merit scrutiny, the administration is scaling back the government’s efforts. If Trump were serious about cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse at universities, he would be strengthening the federal oversight bodies that ensure scientific integrity in research. Instead, Trump has gutted them....

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Why Canada is ill-equipped to tackle the growing threat of fake science
https://www.canadianaffairs.news/20...-to-tackle-the-growing-threat-of-fake-science

A leading academic integrity watchdog is calling for Canada to raise its academic standards around published research. [...] research due to breaches of scientific integrity rose nearly 90 per cent worldwide from 2022 to 2023. Few of these involved Canadian academics ... because Canada’s oversight processes are too lax. [...] Canada rarely publicizes research misconduct, and criminal proceedings are almost unheard of. [...] “This lack of transparency makes it very challenging to study research misconduct in Canada, as data are difficult to obtain and universities are often reluctant to release such information...”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Self-plagiarism and redundant publications: A true scientific misconduct
https://www.mdpi.com/2379-139X/11/9/102

This editorial provides insights on plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and redundant publications, which all represent a serious and common form of misconduct in research. Self-plagiarism and redundant publications [...] are distinct ethical issues in academic and scientific writing. Self-plagiarism, also defined as text-recycling or text overlap, involves reusing one’s own previously published work, either verbatim or with minor modifications, without proper attribution. While not considered theft in the same way plagiarism of another’s work is, self-plagiarism is still a form of academic misconduct and may have serious consequences...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“I’d like to think I’d be able to spot one”: How journalists navigate predatory journals
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2025.2551984

ABSTRACT: Predatory journals—or journals that prioritize profits over editorial and publication best practices—are becoming more common, raising concerns about the integrity of the scholarly record. Such journals also pose a threat for the integrity of science journalism, as journalists may unwillingly report on low-quality or even highly flawed studies published in these venues.

This study sheds light on how journalists navigate this challenging publishing landscape through a qualitative analysis of interviews with 23 health, science, and environmental journalists from Europe and North America about their perceptions of predatory journals and strategies for ensuring the journals they report on are trustworthy. We find that journalists have relatively limited awareness and/or concern about predatory journals.

Much of this attitude is due to confidence in their established practices for avoiding problematic research, which largely centre on perceptions of journal prestige, reputation, and familiarity, as well as writing quality and professionalism. Most express limited awareness of how their trust heuristics may discourage them from reporting on smaller, newer, and open access journals, especially those based in the Global South.

We discuss implications for the accuracy and diversity of the science news that reaches the public...
_
 
Unintended side effects HPV and shingles vaccines -- Reason for concern
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/un...-hpv-and-shingles-vaccines-reason-for-concern

INTRO: Emerging trends in the peer-reviewed scientific literature show new evidence of unintended effects of two popular vaccines—the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and shingles vaccines. Surprising findings clearly indicate a relationship between these vaccines and various cancers, cardiovascular disease and dementia... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Richard Dawkins on new threats to science -- from religion to relativism
https://reason.com/2025/09/07/richard-dawkins-on-the-new-enemies-of-scientific-thinking

EXCERPTS: Last year, you wrote an article in The Spectator called "Why I'm sticking up for science" about the adoption of certain Māori origin myths being presented as science in New Zealand schools. What was going on there?

RD: This is a very strange business. I arrived in New Zealand and was immediately aware that I was in the midst of a great controversy. The New Zealand government—which was then a socialist government; it's changed now, but the present government is doing the same thing—is importing compulsorily into science classes in New Zealand schools, Māori myths. And they are being given equal status to what they call "Western science." Which is just science. It's not "Western"; it's just science.

[...] It's pandering to, I think, a kind of guilt that white New Zealanders feel toward the Māori indigenous population, and bending over backward to show respect to the indigenous population. [...] I became involved because a number of distinguished scientists [...] protesting about this [...] As a consequence, they had their lectures canceled, they were threatened with expulsion... (MORE - details)
_
 
How China seeks to solve its quality control conundrum
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals...a-seeks-solve-quality-control/103/web/2025/09

KEY INSIGHTS: The number of clinical trials conducted in China is rising dramatically. Historically, scientists have had concerns about the quality of research in China. Researchers within China have pushed to improve clinical trial design in the country...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

How an academic betrayal led me to change my authorship practices
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-academic-betrayal-led-me-change-my-authorship-practices

INTRO: The day the paper was published should have been a moment of pride. Instead, it felt like a quiet erasure. There it was: the data set I had helped shape, the computer scripts I had debugged and refined, the analytical framework I had spent months developing—all neatly embedded in a peer-reviewed journal article. But my name was absent. The feeling of exclusion was painful enough—but what stung more was that I had seen it coming, yet had felt powerless to stop it...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

AI tool detects LLM-generated text in research papers and peer reviews
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02936-6

EXCERPT: The analysis found that AI-generated text in peer-review reports dropped by 50% in late 2023, after the AACR banned peer reviewers from using LLMs. But detections of AI-generated text in peer-review comments more than doubled by early 2024 and continued to climb.

It “was disconcerting to see people increasing the usage of LLMs for peer review in spite of us prohibiting that usage”, says Evanko. He adds that “our intention is definitely to start screening all incoming manuscripts and all incoming peer review comments”.

The tool “seems to work exceptionally well”, says Adam Day, founder of Clear Skies, a London-based research-integrity firm. However, “there may be bias that we’re not seeing regarding false positive rate, and we should be mindful of that”, he adds...
_
 
Can researchers stop AI making up citations?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02853-8

EXCERPTS: Artificial intelligence (AI) models are known to confidently conjure up fake citations. When the company OpenAI released GPT-5, a suite of large language models (LLMs), last month, it said it had reduced the frequency of fake citations and other kinds of ‘hallucination’, as well as ‘deceptions’, whereby an AI claims to have performed a task it hasn’t. [...] But in particularly technical fields, such as law and mathematics, GPT-5 is still likely to struggle...

[...] Hallucinations are a result of the fundamental way in which LLMs work. As statistical machines, the models make predictions by generalizing on the basis of learnt associations, leading them to produce answers that are plausible, but sometimes wrong. Another issue is that, similar to a student scoring points for guessing on a multiple choice exam, during training, LLMs get rewarded for having a go rather than acknowledging their uncertainty, according to a preprint published by OpenAI on 4 September.

[...] Eliminating hallucinations entirely is likely to prove impossible...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Research integrity needs a kindness agenda or we will lose ECRs
https://www.timeshighereducation.co...ty-needs-kindness-agenda-or-we-will-lose-ecrs

EXCERPTS: Like many eager, bright-eyed early-career researchers [ECRs], I was initially optimistic that shining the light on dodgy research practices could only make things better. I soon learned, however, that there is more to addressing research integrity than at first meets the eye. While institutions promote open research as the silver bullet, they often fail to ask what kind of culture we are asking ECRs to be open within.

[...] My own research has shown that many ECRs are hesitant to participate in open research practices because of these cultural issues. It is not that they don’t value transparency or don’t want to improve the state of research culture. It is that they fear vulnerability in spaces that do not feel safe.

One participant commented that “open science is a great thing, but more needs to be done to ensure that it is practised with kindness and inclusivity. There are people online who are horrible to researchers (under the guise of open science) who may have just made honest or trivial mistakes”. I am often invited to present my research about open science in different institutions, and ECRs regularly slink up to me in the coffee break and share identical perspectives.

Of course, a lot of more senior academics have similar experiences, too, but the sting is particularly felt by ECRs...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Evaluating the visual design of science publications—a quantitative approach comparing legitimate and predatory journal papers
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-025-05411-1

ABSTRACT: The rise of predatory publishing poses a significant challenge to the integrity of scientific research, potentially undermining the credibility of scholarly communications. As parts of the academic community grapple with distinguishing legitimate from dubious publications, understanding the subtle differences between them becomes paramount.

Therefore, this study focuses on some of these subtleties by examining the aesthetic differences in journal research papers published by potential predatory publishers versus legitimate ones. A comprehensive analysis was undertaken on 443 legitimate and 555 predatory Open Access publications, utilizing a rigorous quantitative approach.

This investigation encompassed an evaluation of metadata, layout elements (such as typography, white space, page sizes, and figures), and other measurable visual attributes. Not only do the findings reveal statistically significant disparities in the visual presentation and embedded metadata of the published PDFs (potentially shedding light on the tools used for document creation), but the investigation also serves as a proof of concept for the employed analytical method:

Using Python as scripting language, we offer a scalable solution for scrutinizing large datasets of PDF files based on design criteria, all while upholding a stringent quantitative approach.
_
 
Reviewers behaving badly

EXCERPT: The point of reviewing an article for publication is to offer constructive criticism, not ad hominem zingers. I mean, even if a manuscript is an insult to science, you can tell the authors what you think is wrong with it and why you don’t think it should be published. I realize that takes longer than insulting them, but there you have it. There really are worthless manuscripts out there, God knows, but just saying “This is worthless” doesn’t do anything to help solve the problem... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Why swapping high fructose corn syrup for sugar won’t make you healthier
https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/09/1...orn-syrup-sugar-wont-make-you-healthier-49731

INTRO: In a post on X, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., cheered Tyson Foods Company’s decision to drop high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) from its branded products by the end of this year. He wrote, “I call on every food company to follow your lead and join the movement to Make America Healthy Again.”

There’s only one problem with that post: nothing supports the secretary’s claim that swapping HFCS for table sugar (sucrose) makes you healthier. Science shows your body processes them the same way—and too much of either is harmful... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The anatomy of a bad argument
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-student-contributors/anatomy-bad-argument

INTRO: Ever find yourself in a heated argument about climate change, vaccines, or whether the moon landing was “just Hollywood propaganda”? Suddenly, you’re not debating facts, you’re dodging YouTube links and rants about shadow governments. If you’ve ever wondered how a conversation spiraled into chaos, the FLICC framework might help you make sense of it.

FLICC is a deceptively cute acronym for a seriously helpful tool: Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories. First coined by climate communication researcher John Cook in 2013, the FLICC framework helps us identify the rhetorical smoke and mirrors often used to deny scientific consensus. Let’s break it down... (MORE - details)
_
 
Publish or perish’ evolutionary pressures shape scientific publishing, for better and worse
https://theconversation.com/publish...ntific-publishing-for-better-and-worse-259258

EXCERPTS: Darwin didn’t judge the wasps. Instead, he was troubled by what they revealed about evolution. They showed natural selection to be an amoral process. Any behavior that enhances fitness, nice or nasty, would spread. [...] Culture shapes everything people do, not least scientific practice – how scientists decide what questions to ask and how to answer them. Good scientific practices lead to public benefits, while poor scientific practices waste time and money. [...] Recently there have been moves away from these simple-yet-flawed metrics. But without better alternatives, institutions simply put more emphasis on the raw number of publications, selecting for scientists to publish as much as they can, as fast as they can. Perhaps you’ve heard of the slogan “publish or perish,” or maybe even played the board game... (MORE - details)
_
 
A 40-year study finds higher science funding under Republicans
https://www.psypost.org/a-40-year-study-finds-higher-science-funding-under-republicans/

A sweeping 40-year analysis of United States government spending reveals that federal science and research programs received more funding when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and the presidency. The new research, which challenges common assumptions about political support for science, was published in the journal Science...
- - - - - - -

(paper) Partisan disparities in the funding of science in the United States
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx5154

EXCERPTS: Greater Republican funding of science extends beyond the DoD, which we might expect given the Republican issue ownership of national defense and their tendency to support higher defense spending than their Democratic counterparts...

[...] During the period 1980 to 2020, Republicans allocated more funding than their Democratic counterparts within the topline budgets, a finding that challenges prevailing narratives of Republicans as “anti-science”. This robust support, observed across multiple agencies and departments, underscores the historical importance of Republican investments in science and research. These findings suggest that current advocacy strategies for science funding aimed at Republican lawmakers could emphasize how investments in research have historically aligned with conservative values, such as economic growth, technological innovation, and national security.

[...] Although these findings should not be interpreted as implying that Democrats do not value or support research and science funding, they do suggest that appropriations have historically been more generous under Republican control. One plausible explanation for our results is that Democrats may have more competing discretionary spending priorities such as health care, education, or social insurance, leaving less funding available for science and research. Given a relatively stable size of the overall federal budget, Democrats may be faced with more challenging trade-offs.

Alternatively, it could be the case that Republicans prioritize science and research funding more than their Democratic peers because a substantial portion of this funding is outlaid to private firms. Overall, more research is needed to understand the mechanisms driving these partisan disparities in science and research funding... (MORE - details)
_
 
Jay Bhattacharya wants to fix science. Is he in over his head?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/...e_code=1.n08.5bGQ.RXip0nkxveXt&smid=url-share

EXCERPTS: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the National Institutes of Health, has inherited an agency in crisis. Everyone knows it. [...] To close observers, the original crisis began well before any of this, in the dawning realization that a lot of medical research is junk that can’t be reproduced, that promised cures have fizzled and that Americans shell out more money on health care than people in other wealthy countries, and yet we are sicker and die younger. When all this is true, can we really say the so-called crown jewel of American medical science is succeeding? (MORE - details)
_
 
C C said:
Jay Bhattacharya wants to fix science. Is he in over his head?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/...e_code=1.n08.5bGQ.RXip0nkxveXt&smid=url-share

EXCERPTS: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the National Institutes of Health, has inherited an agency in crisis. Everyone knows it. [...] To close observers, the original crisis began well before any of this, in the dawning realization that a lot of medical research is junk that can’t be reproduced, that promised cures have fizzled and that Americans shell out more money on health care than people in other wealthy countries, and yet we are sicker and die younger. When all this is true, can we really say the so-called crown jewel of American medical science is succeeding? (MORE - details)
_
Click to expand...
While there is no doubt truth to the picture painted of a conservative bureaucracy, it seems to me quite wrong - and possibly disingenuous - to lay the excessive cost and poor health outcomes of the US health system at the door of this research organisation.

It is obvious to almost everyone that the real reasons for those problems are the private, insurance funded nature of the system. The normal business incentives towards bargain-seeking and value for money are simply absent, because the insurance companies can just load the costs onto the customer, who is usually paying via deductions from his salary made by his employer and thus has no way to influence what he is charged. It's a classic broken market.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of medical research, wasteful though that may well also be. But it is in the interests of the medical corporations, who are no doubt Republican party sponsors, to keep the spotlight away from their gravy train and turned instead onto research.
 
  • Like
Reactions: C C
The role of political parties in the shaping of scientific inquiry
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099483

EXCERPTS: Although scholarship has demonstrated the inextricability of the history of science from the histories of industry and politics, little attention has been paid to the role of political parties in the shaping of scientific inquiry.

A new article in Isis, “The Political Elaboration on Science and Technology of the Italian Communist Party Between the 1960s and the 1980s,” investigates how political parties mediate social change and scientific progress, using the Partito Comunista Italiano as its object of analysis.

[...] In spite of its hierarchical structure, the PCI became a place where senior scientists, young nontenured scientists, politicians and policymakers, technicians, and workers freely debated. Different positions coexisted, but the prevailing one stressed that science was not neutral.

According to this view, the devastation of environment, the arms race, and the compression of workers’ role in factories were not the results of a “neutral” science, but rather those of the development of a military-oriented and consumerist science. The party’s collective reflection on the “non-neutrality” of science led the party leader, Enrico Berlinguer, to formulate the “austerity policy” as a way to give workers back their centrality in productive processes and at the same time establish a non-colonial relation with the Global South.

In the 1970s, when the global oil crisis spurred a panic over energy dependence, tension emerged within the party regarding the construction of nuclear power plants. Although nuclear energy presented a cleaner alternative to oil, and one that would reduce the extraction of resources from the Global South, the nuclear pollution posed an even greater problem. Moreover, the security required to monitor nuclear power sites would mean the increased militarization of the whole Italian society, the construction of an “atomic state” like in the postwar United States.

With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union, the orientation of the PCI shifted from communism to social democracy and the party changed its name. But these dialogues demonstrate the nature of political parties as “places where ideas are debated, formed, and elaborated,” and remain as a record of the PCI’s efforts to couple science with radical ends.

By framing science within the structure of global inequality, Cozzoli concludes, the PCI aligned themselves with the growing movement in the history of science to recognize contributions and people that have previously gone overlooked... (MORE - details, no ads)
_
 
Study on apple cider vinegar for weight loss retracted after many raise concerns
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/09...-weight-loss-study-retracted-bmj/#more-132917

Their article appeared in March 2024 in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health. The journal is retracting the paper “because the authors’ analyses could not be replicated and multiple errors were identified,” according to the retraction notice. The retraction, dated September 23, comes more than a year after sleuths pointed out some of these errors and other problems with the analysis...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

UK fires tenured professor following investigation into misconduct
https://www.wkyt.com/2025/09/11/uk-fires-tenured-professor-following-investigation-into-misconduct/

INTRO: The University of Kentucky says it has fired a tenured professor following a university audit that uncovered misconduct tied to UK’s former Equine Analytical Chemistry Lab. According to the university, an internal investigation into Dr. Scott Stanley began in early 2024.

The audit found Stanley falsified drug testing results, engaged in fraudulent billing practices, failed to follow established testing protocols, and concealed outside business relationships that should have been disclosed under university rules. UK officials say Stanley’s actions compromised the integrity of drug testing results and demonstrated a significant lack of oversight... (MORE - details)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Make research accessible. It benefits all chemists
https://cen.acs.org/careers/diversity/Make-research-accessible-benefits-chemists/103/web/2025/09

EXCERPTS: This year’s edition of C&EN’s Trailblazers celebrates 12 chemists with disabilities who are pushing the boundaries of their fields. They’re designing new drugs, transforming waste into high-performance materials, and probing the quantum world, among other advances.

[...] these cuts likely stem from a misguided yet prevailing belief that people with disabilities are a burden and that accommodating them reduces the rigor of science.

But keeping research inaccessible certainly doesn't do science any favors. Instead, it risks pushing brilliant, talented researchers out of labs, as was the case for at least one of our Trailblazers. And inaccessible environments can affect anybody.... (MORE - details)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

‘Shut out’: Journal fires editor after publishing research refuting ‘warming climate’
https://www.thecollegefix.com/shut-...publishing-research-refuting-warming-climate/

EXCERPTS: Marty Rowland is no longer a special editor at the American Journal of Economics and Sociology after he published a paper challenging mainstream climate change narratives.

The paper, titled 'Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems,' faced immediate calls for retraction, its authors told The College Fix. Scholars expressed concerns about a trend of censorship and retaliation against researchers who question prevailing climate science, asserting that dissenting opinions are increasingly marginalized.

[...] “In short there was no legitimate reason to fire Dr. Rowland for publishing our fully peer-reviewed, and well received, paper,” May wrote. [...] May said none of the critics “identified any errors” in their article, which is why it hasn’t been retracted.

[...] The publisher, Wiley, “disagreed with our conclusions and wanted to censor our paper, thankfully the board did not do that, but they did fire Marty, which was a very bad move” May told The Fix. ... “The pressures are huge. Basically, if a climate researcher does not toe the ‘consensus’ line, he will receive no funding for his work and will be ostracized. He or she is then often forced to resign or fired.” (MORE - details)
_
 
Whose papers have an edge at Science? In unusual study, journal looks in the mirror
https://www.science.org/content/art...science-em-unusual-study-journal-looks-mirror

INTRO: If you wanted to get a paper published in Science from 2015 to 2020, your odds were 70% lower if you were in China than in the United States. But being at an elite institution anywhere in the world may have given you an edge. Those are two findings from a rare study of internal data about submissions to the prominent, highly selective journal. The study shines a light on potential biases in acceptance and where they may arise in the complex process of choosing papers for publication... (MORE - details)
_
 
C C said:
Whose papers have an edge at Science? In unusual study, journal looks in the mirror
https://www.science.org/content/art...science-em-unusual-study-journal-looks-mirror

INTRO: If you wanted to get a paper published in Science from 2015 to 2020, your odds were 70% lower if you were in China than in the United States. But being at an elite institution anywhere in the world may have given you an edge. Those are two findings from a rare study of internal data about submissions to the prominent, highly selective journal. The study shines a light on potential biases in acceptance and where they may arise in the complex process of choosing papers for publication... (MORE - details)
_
Click to expand...
But surely people at elite institutions tend to do better work, don’t they? Dat why dem belong elite!
 
  • Like
Reactions: C C
exchemist said:
But surely people at elite institutions tend to do better work, don’t they? Dat why dem belong elite!
Click to expand...
  • excerpt: “The burden of proof is on the claim that these differences are the product of prejudice or arbitrariness rather than the result of legitimate scientific assessments of the quality and suitability of the papers involved.” Still, observational data like these can help journals track potential biases, says Jory Chapin Lerback, a hydrologist who advises the American Geophysical Union on publishing.
In the box of the broader world, though, a noble narrative crusading against privilege, hegemony, and systemic favoritism may sometimes prevail instead. ("Good story enchantment" or "moral-fight conspiracy" kayos "providing sufficient evidence".). Even the very idea of _X_ possessing better standards than _Y_ can be offensive to a radical egalitarian viewpoint or agenda that expands beyond just individual equality to the universal parity of all or most enterprises, cultures, and diverse traditions.

Hopefully political ideology doesn't covertly underlie intentions like this in science publishing. But even if it did, there would be blatant "language signs" eventually indicating or suggesting it as the actual driving motive.
_
 
C C said:
  • excerpt: “The burden of proof is on the claim that these differences are the product of prejudice or arbitrariness rather than the result of legitimate scientific assessments of the quality and suitability of the papers involved.” Still, observational data like these can help journals track potential biases, says Jory Chapin Lerback, a hydrologist who advises the American Geophysical Union on publishing.
In the box of the broader world, though, a noble narrative crusading against privilege, hegemony, and systemic favoritism may sometimes prevail instead. ("Good story enchantment" or "moral-fight conspiracy" kayos "providing sufficient evidence".). Even the very idea of _X_ possessing better standards than _Y_ can be offensive to a radical egalitarian viewpoint or agenda that expands beyond just individual equality to the universal parity of all or most enterprises, cultures, and diverse traditions.

Hopefully political ideology doesn't covertly underlie intentions like this in science publishing. But even if it did, there would be blatant "language signs" eventually indicating or suggesting it as the actual driving motive.
_
Click to expand...
Yeah I get a bit fed up with the way this term "elite" has become almost one of disparagement. This is largely thanks to current far right populist politics, but also due to some lazily egalitarian assumptions on the left as well. People are starting to lose sight of how elite institutions came to be so.
 
It’s JAMA time, baby! Junk science presented as public health research
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia....k-science-presented-as-public-health-research

EXCERPTS: 7% of adults have been present at the scene of a mass shooting? Believe it or not, there’s a lesson in probability theory here. Matt Lerner points with skepticism to this new paper from JAMA [...] The published paper is terrible, the kind of junk science that gets published because it enhances a political agenda. [...] It’s well known that people overstate the frequencies of rare events. Whether this is misremembering, misclassification, or something else, I don’t know–but even a very small false-positive rate will destroy your estimate, if the true underlying frequency is low... (MORE - details)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The current war on science, and who’s behind it
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/who-should-we-blame-for-the-current-war-on-science

EXCERPTS: It is against this backdrop that a climate scientist and a vaccine developer teamed up to write Science Under Siege. It is about as grim as you’d expect. [...] Neither of them anticipated becoming crusaders for their respective fields—and neither probably anticipated that their respective fields would ever actually need crusaders. But they each have taken on the challenge, and they’ve been rewarded for their trouble with condemnation and harassment from Congress and death threats from the public they are trying to serve. In this book, they hope to take what they’ve learned as scientists and science communicators in our current world and parlay that into a call to arms... (MORE - details)
_
 
Is this the most embarrassing error in the DOE Climate Working Group Report?
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-error

In the last few weeks, I’ve often been asked, “What’s the most significant mistake in the DOE Climate Working Group Report?” While the report contains numerous issues, one in particular stands out for its far-reaching implications. I write about it in this post...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Journal issues speedy retraction in less than a day for ‘inadvertent mistake’
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10...n-in-less-than-a-day-for-inadvertent-mistake/

We don’t know if it’s the fastest retraction ever, but the speed is nonetheless notable: A journal retracted a paper 22 hours after a sleuth raised concerns about the article...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Former student who ran paper mill up to 11 retractions
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10/01/former-student-who-ran-paper-mill-up-to-11-retractions/

A former bioinformatics student who operated a paper mill while at the University of Manchester has lost another paper, bringing his total to 11 retractions...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sleuth unearths citation, authorship issues at earth sciences journal
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/09...-authorship-issues-at-earth-sciences-journal/

Carlos Conforti Ferreira Guedes, a geology professor at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil, came across a paper in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences earlier this year with irrelevant, and in some cases nonexistent, references...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Duke scientists lose eight papers for alleged image manipulation
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/09...e-eight-papers-for-alleged-image-manipulation

Eight papers by two emeritus researchers from Duke University have been retracted in recent months for alleged image duplications. Although the researchers had worked at the university for decades, Duke officials have not responded to repeated inquiries about the retractions...
_
 
The Bystander Effect started from a lie
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-history/bystander-effect-started-lie

EXCERPT: This real-life tragedy has now become a myth, described by one academic paper as The Parable of the 38 Witnesses. When its authors flipped through the 10 most popular textbooks aimed at psychology undergraduate students, they found the story in all of them. Every textbook claimed that nobody intervened and that the cops were called after Kitty Genovese had died, and almost all of them suggested that 38 witnesses had simply watched from their windows as Ms. Genovese was brutally attacked for half an hour... (MORE - details)
_
 
Scientific journals in the hot seat
https://www.insidehighered.com/news.../scientific-publishing-industry-faces-federal

Federal officials are raising long-standing concerns with research journals and the academic incentive structures propping them up. But experts say the government alone can’t overhaul the industry...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Materials scientists warn of threat posed by AI-generated experimental images
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news...guishable-from-the-real-thing/4022215.article

A new nanoscience paper describes an exciting new material that closely resembles a much-loved puffed corn snack. A scatter of twisted tubes, dubbed nano-cheetos, are shown in a clear electron microscopy image. The only problem: the material isn’t real. The image was made with ChatGPT, by a team of materials scientists who warn that such AI-generated images could make scientific fraud near-undetectable...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The problem with inadequately reviewed fringe science
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-problem-with-inadequately-reviewed-fringe-science

Skeptics usually recognize pseudoscience when we see it. Our heuristics include an assessment of the qualifications and reputations of an idea’s proponents, and whether the idea has been peer-reviewed. Fringe claims sometimes do make it into peer-reviewed publications as a result of flaws in the system. [...] Like cold fusion and climate denial, the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is rejected by virtually all experts. But reports of its death might be exaggerated. It appeals to segments of the public that subscribe to the conspiratorial notion of a “mainstream narrative” that is propped up by a “scientific establishment.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Can social media provide early warning of retraction? Evidence from critical tweets identified by human annotation and large language models
https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.70028

ABSTRACT: Timely detection of problematic research is essential for safeguarding scientific integrity. To explore whether social media commentary can serve as an early indicator of potentially problematic articles, this study analyzed 3815 tweets referencing 604 retracted articles and 3373 tweets referencing 668 comparable non-retracted articles.

Tweets critical of the articles were identified through both human annotation and large language models (LLMs). Human annotation revealed that 8.3% of retracted articles were associated with at least one critical tweet prior to retraction, compared to only 1.5% of non-retracted articles, highlighting the potential of tweets as early warning signals of retraction.

However, critical tweets identified by LLMs (GPT-4o mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, and Claude 3.5 Haiku) only partially aligned with human annotation, suggesting that fully automated monitoring of post-publication discourse should be applied with caution. A human–AI collaborative approach may offer a more reliable and scalable alternative, with human expertise helping to filter out tweets critical of issues unrelated to the research integrity of the articles.

Overall, this study provides insights into how social media signals, combined with generative AI technologies, may support efforts to strengthen research integrity.
_
 
Paper Chase: A Global Industry Fuels Scientific Fraud in the U.S.
https://www.realclearinvestigations...9567.html?mc_cid=430c0bbb84&mc_eid=0622ebfa37

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal. [...] Paper mills appear to be expanding at a rapid clip, aided by AI that enables them to overwhelm journals with dozens of papers in a short period of time, adding to the challenge of detecting fakes...
_
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top