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

[C C]

The worst research papers I’ve ever published
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/10/09/the-worst-papers-ive-ever-written

INTRO: Following up on this recent post, I’m preparing something on weak research produced by Nobel prize winners. Just to be fair, I thought I should lead this off with a post on weak research produced by . . . me!

Putting together this list wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. I’ve published hundreds of papers and I like almost all of them! But I found a few that I think it’s fair to say are pretty bad. These papers have coauthors, but I blame me, not them, for the bad stuff... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Soil scientist previously named in citation scandal appointed to editor role at Elsevier journal
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10...andal-appointed-editor-role-elsevier-journal/

A soil scientist who resigned from several journals in 2017 after being linked to manipulated citations has been appointed to the editorial board of a journal copublished by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media...

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Deputy minister in Iraq losing papers with signs of paper mill involvement
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10...-papers-with-signs-of-paper-mill-involvement/

A high-ranking official at Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research has earned six retractions over the past two years for issues including citation stuffing and “suspicious” authorship changes after articles were accepted...

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‘Cosmic magnet’ study retracted after cleaning agent wipes away results
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10...cted-after-cleaning-agent-wipes-away-results/

Greer became aware of the issue during unsuccessful attempts to replicate his lab’s discovery of magnetic properties in an alloy their collaborators had made. Instead, they found oxidation from a cleaning product had contaminated their original results. The error led to a retraction, a declined grant, a commentary describing their troubleshooting — and a story about science working as it should...

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Editors of criminology journal resign amid concern about review times
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10...urnal-resign-amid-concern-about-review-times/

The top editors of a criminology journal have stepped down after the society in charge of the publication assessed concerns about manuscript review times...

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$1.5 million program targets changes to academic incentives
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10/06/1-5-million-program-targets-changes-to-academic-incentives/

The incentive systems that drive academic research underlie nearly every story we write: publication counts for promotion, pressure to produce positive results, hitting certain metrics, and so on. Critics have long called for change in these systems, but support for such change is hard to come by...
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[C C]

Research commissioner appears to cite discredited study in AI speech
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/ai/research-commissioner-appears-cite-discredited-study-ai-speech

The EU’s research commissioner appears to have cited a widely discredited and possibly fabricated study in a speech extolling the benefits of AI in science...

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Identifying common patterns in journals that retracted papers from paper mills: a cross-sectional study
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41073-025-00177-9

This study suggests that paper mill retractions are concentrated in a small number of journals with common characteristics: high open access rates, intermediate impact factor quartiles, a high volume of citable items, and classification in medicine and health categories. Short editorial times may indicate a higher presence of paper mill publications, but more research is needed to examine this factor in depth, as well as the possible influence of acceptance rates...

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Is science retracting enough papers?
https://conexiant.com/internal-medi...old-yet-represent-fraction-of-flawed-research

As paper mills and fraud proliferate, experts warn the retraction rate should reach 2% of published literature—ten times current levels. [...] Scientific retractions have increased approximately 10-fold over the past two decades [...] Despite this dramatic increase, Dr. Oransky argued that retraction rates remain inadequate. [...] Misconduct now accounts for two-thirds of all retractions, a shift driven largely by increased detection rather than necessarily higher rates of fraud...

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“The system is not designed for replications”
https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=15006

The verification of research results by means of replication studies is decisive for safeguarding the reliability of science. However, such replication studies have not so far attracted a great deal of attention from researchers. The Münster Center for Open Science (MüCOS) aims to remedy this and has therefore started up a series of scientific publications entitled “Replication Research”. In this interview with Linus Peikenkamp, psychologist Dr. Lukas Röseler, the Managing Director of MüCOS, explains why replications are indispensable for preserving quality in science and what the role of the new publication is...

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eLife’s New Model: Changing the way you share your research
https://elifesciences.org/inside-el...odel-changing-the-way-you-share-your-research

From next year, eLife is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review, instead focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprints...


Scientific publishing without gatekeeping: an empirical investigation of eLife’s new peer review process
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-025-05422-y

ABSTRACT: At the end of January 2023, eLife introduced a new publishing model (alongside the old-traditional-publishing model): all manuscripts submitted as preprints are peer-reviewed and published if they are deemed worthy of review by the editorial team (“editorial triage”). The model abandons the gatekeeping function and retains the previous “consultative approach to peer review”.

Even under the changed conditions, the question of the quality of judgements in the peer review process remains. In this study, the reviewers’ ratings of manuscripts submitted to eLife were examined in terms of both descriptive comparisons of peer review models, and the following selected quality criteria of peer review: interrater agreement and interrater reliability.

eLife provided us with the data on all manuscripts submitted in 2023 according to the new publishing model (group 3, N = 3,846), as well as manuscripts submitted according to the old publishing model (group 1: N = 6,592 submissions from 2019; group 2: N = 364 submissions from 2023). The interrater agreement and interrater reliability for the criteria “significance of findings” and “strength of support” were similarly low, as previous empirical studies for gatekeeping journals have shown.

The fairness of peer review is not or only slightly compromised. We used the empirical results of our study to recommend several improvements to the new publishing model introduced by eLife as for example, increasing transparency, masking author identity or increasing the number of expert reviewers...
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[C C]

Consumer Reports’ Latest Panic: “Toxic” Lead in Protein Powders
https://news.immunologic.org/p/consumer-reports-latest-panic-toxic

Consumer Reports is at it again, this time, fear-mongering about lead in protein powders. Their latest headline and “report” concludes that various protein powders are filled with harmful levels of lead, and they use scary-looking graphics with percentages above 1000, to evoke that health anxiety they are so good at...

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What comes after gender affirmation?
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-comes-after-gender-affirmation

Making transition the first-line treatment for children was a mistake, many health agencies now say. A growing group of psychologists wants to restore the therapeutic relationship...

EXCERPT: England’s National Health Service is in the process of re-training therapists to meet this moment. But in the United States, every professional organization in the mental health field — the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the corresponding groups for psychoanalysts, therapists, counselors, and social workers — all continue to stand behind the affirmative model: accept a patient’s gender identity as innate and off-limits for exploratory discussion, regardless of the patient’s age or general mental health.

This, says Paul Garcia-Ryan, executive director of a small but growing organization for mental health professionals called Therapy First, has put his colleagues in an unprecedented — and unfortunate — position, asking them to treat trans patients in an exceptional way that precludes the precepts of therapy itself: asking questions and exploring emotions so that their clients may better know themselves. In the context of young people, he says, the model disregards the fluid nature of adolescent identity formation... MORE - details)
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[C C]

Putting knowledge before prestige
https://www.labnews.co.uk/article/2098115/putting-knowledge-before-prestige

EXCERPT: For scientists, publishing in high impact factor journals has become the ultimate academic currency. Careers, funding and prestige all hinge on it. Researchers and institutions must conform to these metric-driven standards, not because they serve the advancement of knowledge but because opting out feels professionally perilous and isolating.

Taken together, these perverse incentives have served to reduce the reliability of the published literature, which in turn has caused the public to question how much they can trust scientists and the scientific endeavour... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

‘Confusing and frankly, disturbing’: When researchers are impersonated
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10...-disturbing-when-researchers-are-impersonated

EXCERP: Identity theft is a growing threat to academia. Fraudsters may impersonate reviewers or former colleagues to make sure articles they or their accomplices write receive favorable reviews. Journals may be hijacked, swindling authors into paying hundreds of dollars for useless publications. Or researchers may find their names on papers they never wrote... (MORE - details)

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Intellectual Quackery: When medical journals won’t publish corrections
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/intellectual-quackery

INTRO: ‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research’ has the dullest possible title for what it reveals. In yet another example of trans ideology destroying everything it touches, the most prestigious journals in medicine are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.

The author, J. Cohn, didn’t set out to write about censorship. She tried to correct errors in published papers. When that didn’t work, she described what happened. She found that multiple systematic reviews (the gold standard in evidence-based medicine) have found low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions. This includes puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. ‘Low certainty’ means there’s limited confidence the estimated effects will match what actually happens to patients.

The Cass Review, published in 2024, found the evidence for paediatric interventions “remarkably weak.” Several other systematic reviews found the same for patients under 21 and under 26.

None have found that these interventions reduce suicide risk. Meanwhile, major medical journals keep publishing papers claiming the opposite... (MORE - details)

Applied Postmodernism: How "Idea Laundering" is Crippling American Universities

 

[C C]

The [political] party of science is over
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-party-of-science-is-over

EXCERPTS: As Melinda Gormley and Melissae Fellet observed in a 2015 article about the debate, neither scientist tried to portray himself as objective about the matter; neither claimed that the scientific facts as he understood them were independent from his beliefs about how best to pursue peace. [...] Disagreement between scientific experts about how to deal with the risks created by nuclear weapons would have to be resolved democratically.

In the decades following the Pauling–Teller debate, scientific research aimed at informing public policy expanded enormously to help meet the risks and challenges of a rapidly modernizing world. This was a new task for science. Billions of dollars funded thousands of scientists to study [disparate] questions...

[...] Research programs motivated by such questions were supposed to reduce uncertainties to arrive at the truth of the matter. Agreement on actions to solve the problems was supposed to follow. But in very few cases did this happen. ... And disagreement about what to do persisted, and often got worse.

[...] Seventy years of growing entanglement between science and politics show that the truths that matter most in democratic decision-making emerge from the political arena, not the laboratory... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

The true story of the dishonest honesty study (book review)
https://www.city-journal.org/article/max-h-bazerman-inside-an-academic-scandal-fraudulent-data-study

EXCERPTS: Some social-science findings are just plain fun. They instantly lend themselves to media coverage and perhaps a TED Talk. Harvard business professor Max H. Bazerman made such a finding back in 2012: people behaved more honestly, he and four coauthors reported, if they signed a statement promising to be honest beforehand.

[...] Some companies changed their processes in response to the findings. Just one problem: the effect was never real. The data analyzed for at least two and perhaps all three experiments had been doctored. Shockingly, it seems that two separate processes, involving different people, contributed to the fakery—in a study about honesty... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Shadow scholars: inside Kenya’s multibillion-dollar fake-essay industry
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03399-5

Sociologist Patricia Kingori is helping to expose contract cheating by scholars in high-income countries...

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Pressure to publish is rising as research time shrinks, finds survey of scientists
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03623-2

Researchers feel that pressures to publish are increasing, but the time and resources available to do research are decreasing, according to a survey by Elsevier...

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The inner workings of a paper mill: My Norxin sting operation
https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-inner-workings-of-paper-mill.html

Bottom line: The whole thing is extremely depressing. Chinese mills are still in full operation. As I explained before, the only way to stop them is from the "demand side" – meaning the entire academic system and the entire for-profit publication industry must be comprehensively reformed. Until this happens, expect more papermills, expect more unreliable papers, and watch how the public trust in science completely dissipates...
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[C C]

Remember that paper claiming the universe is decelerating? Here's what a nobel laureate has to say about it
https://www.universetoday.com/artic...ng-heres-what-a-nobel-laureate-has-to-say-abo

EXCERPTS: This is Part 4 of a series on a recent study claiming the Universe is decelerating. You can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 here. [...] So that very basis of their argument is shaky at best. Of course, don't take my word for it. Just wait for the peer-reviewed papers that will look at all these issues and more. I don't think we'll have to wait long... (MORE - missing details)
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[C C]

How the avalanche of academic papers threatens scientific research
https://www.realclearinvestigations...rs_threatens_scientific_research_1148282.html

EXCERPT: The publishing mess has consequences outside the hallowed halls of academia. The $12 billion in annual revenue that the Big Five and smaller publishers collect from research papers is also an issue for taxpayers. A sizeable chunk of this revenue comes from public universities and federal grants that pay fees to publishers for making scholars’ articles available to readers through either journal subscriptions or freely on the internet. The fees, coupled with the low production costs – journal editors typically work for free – have given the Big Five profit margins in the 30%-40% range, matching Microsoft and Alphabet and surpassing Apple last year.

“The biggest problem is that taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent on research instead goes to these publishing companies,” said University of Ottawa Professor Stefanie Haustein, a leading researcher of the publishing market. “I’m not saying publishing should be free, but these companies are making an insanely high profit. They are price gouging taxpayers.” (MORE - details)
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[exchemist]

Remember that paper claiming the universe is decelerating? Here's what a nobel laureate has to say about it
https://www.universetoday.com/artic...ng-heres-what-a-nobel-laureate-has-to-say-abo

EXCERPTS: This is Part 4 of a series on a recent study claiming the Universe is decelerating. You can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 here. [...] So that very basis of their argument is shaky at best. Of course, don't take my word for it. Just wait for the peer-reviewed papers that will look at all these issues and more. I don't think we'll have to wait long... (MORE - missing details)
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Interesting. I’ve added a note on this to the thread we had recently on this topic, in the Astronomy section.

 

[C C]

A researcher made an AI that completely breaks the online surveys scientists rely on
https://www.404media.co/a-researche...-breaks-the-online-surveys-scientists-rely-on

INTRO: Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab Sean Westwood, created an AI tool he calls "an autonomous synthetic respondent,” which can answer survey questions and “demonstrated a near-flawless ability to bypass the full range” of “state-of-the-art” methods for detecting bots.

According to the paper, the AI agent evaded detection 99.8 percent of the time.

"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people," Westwood said in a press release. "With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem.” (MORE - details)

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Scientific fraud: analysis of a growing phenomenon
https://www.polytechnique-insights....ntific-fraud-analysis-of-a-growing-phenomenon

KEY POINTS:

• A fraudulent article is a deliberately erroneous scientific publication that contains one or more breaches of scientific integrity.
• Currently, analysis tools are far from covering all cases of fraud, as these are very diverse in nature and each requires specific detectors.
• The tools used to conceal falsifications leave specific signatures, such as groups of words with specific frequencies.
• These breaches of trust are not always carried out by isolated individuals but may be linked to cooperation within networks of publishers and authors.
• One solution to tackling scientific fraud would be to strengthen the evaluation system through more preventive measures, or even to rethink its current indicators.

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Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest among physician-authors in leading US psychiatry journals: a cross-sectional study
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/15/11/e104955

Substantial undisclosed financial conflicts of interest were identified among the top 10 earners in high-impact psychiatry journals. These findings highlight potential risks to research transparency and integrity. Further research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of disclosure policies and develop mechanisms to mitigate COIs in psychiatric research...

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More than 200 Korean papers retracted over AI use
https://www.donga.com/en/article/all/20251117/5964730/1

More than 200 academic papers in South Korea have been retracted over suspicions that artificial intelligence was improperly used to reproduce content from ChatGPT. Following a series of AI-assisted cheating cases at major universities, including Seoul National University, the recent confirmation of widespread AI-assisted paper-writing allegations has raised concerns about an emerging “AI-driven turmoil” in academia...
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[C C]

Is our picture of evolution still stuck in the past?
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-our-picture-of-evolution-still-stuck-in-the-past/

We may have ditched the monkey-to-man meme, but the myth of humans as nature’s “pinnacle of evolution” persists in subtler ways...

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Our obsession with statistical significance is ruining science
https://reason.com/2025/12/01/our-obsession-with-statistical-significance-is-ruining-science/

INTRO: A century ago, two oddly domestic puzzles helped set the rules for what modern science treats as "real": a Guinness brewer charged with quality control and a British lady insisting she can taste whether milk or tea was poured first.

Those stories sound quaint, but the machinery they inspired now decides which findings get published, promoted, and believed—and which get waved away as "not significant." Instead of recognizing the limitations of statistical significance, fields including economics and medicine ossified around it, with dire consequences for science. In the 21st century, an obsession with statistical significance led to overprescription of both antidepressant drugs and a headache remedy with lethal side effects. There was another path we could have taken.

Sir Ronald Fisher succeeded 100 years ago in making statistical significance central to scientific investigation. Some scientists have argued for decades that blindly following his approach has led the scientific method down the wrong path. Today, statistical significance has brought many branches of science to a crisis of false-positive findings and bias... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12...cle-retracted-elsevier-monsanto-ghostwriting/

INTRO: A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted eight years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed the herbicide, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.

The safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is hotly debated and currently under review at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, in 2015 declared glyphosate “possibly carcinogenic.” (MORE - details)

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“Gain of Function” research is misunderstood – and that is a problem
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gain-of-function-research-is-misunderstood-and-that-is-a-problem/

INTRO: “Gain of function” (GoF) research refers to genetic modification that deliberately enhances the abilities of an organism — often a virus or bacterium — to study how such changes affect its function, transmissibility, or virulence. In simple terms, it means imparting a new or stronger function that the organism didn’t previously have.

Such modifications, which have been performed for decades, have been extraordinarily important, from inducing bacteria to synthesize pharmaceuticals to imparting pest-resistance to crop plants. Despite the importance of GoF modifications, they have sometimes faced misplaced concerns or opposition that could lead to their being overregulated or even banned... (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

NTRO: A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted eight years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed the herbicide, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.

Good news, and part of a good trend I'm seeing with tainted data coming from corporations like Dupont, Monsanto, Nemours, Saint Gobain, et al.

This ludicrous situation...

He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.

...has been a regulatory nightmare with the big chem companies.

A good read is "They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals" by Mariah Blake.

 

[C C]

Theoretical physics slop
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15362

I had assumed that it was long dead, but no, zombie theoretical physics ideas it seems are all the rage, at Harvard and elsewhere. One consolation of recent years has been that I figured things really couldn’t get much worse. Today though, I realized that such thoughts were highly naive...

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10 scientific truths that somehow became unpopular in 2025
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/10-scientific-truths-unpopular-2025/

Our scientific picture of reality has been constructed painstakingly, over centuries and millennia, by gathering enormous suites of evidence and rejecting all theories that fail to explain what we observe. Through this, we’ve learned about the laws that govern the Earth, fundamental particles, atoms and molecules, our environment, the Universe, and more, refining and enhancing them, over time, wherever possible. But here in 2025, many of the lessons we’ve learned, although still true, have fallen out of favor, having been replaced by untrue sentiments that now dominate public discourse. Still, the truth remains true, and everyone should know what it is...
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[TheVat]

10 scientific truths that somehow became unpopular in 2025

Also posted at the dot net science forum, where several pointed out that some of these items aren't "truths," and some aren't really all that unpopular, and those that are didn't just become so in 2025. And the Kessler syndrome problem with orbital objects is not unpopular, just largely unknown to the general public. (it's a bit like the direct CME strike danger during solar maxima: the small percent who are aware of it generally agree on the threat and the need for preparatory measures)

The warnings about vibe science, and mistaking the meaning of passing peer review, are spot on, however.

 

[C C]

Also posted at the dot net science forum, where several pointed out that some of these items aren't "truths," and some aren't really all that unpopular, and those that are didn't just become so in 2025. And the Kessler syndrome problem with orbital objects is not unpopular, just largely unknown to the general public. (it's a bit like the direct CME strike danger during solar maxima: the small percent who are aware of it generally agree on the threat and the need for preparatory measures)

The warnings about vibe science, and mistaking the meaning of passing peer review, are spot on, however.

I have a tendency to cringe sometimes, when I see "truths" placed beside "scientific". But I guess it's usually (indeed) intended to be in a lower-case sense of degree, despite the tee maybe being contingently capitalized when occurring in a title.
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[exchemist]

I have a tendency to cringe sometimes, when I see "truths" placed beside "scientific". But I guess it's usually (indeed) intended to be in a lower-case sense of degree, despite the tee maybe being contingently capitalized when occurring in a title.
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SANP! My response on the other site opened with: "I must admit I wince rather when people write of "scientific truths". "