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

C C said:
Anyway, that double-edged sword approach of MJ is certainly better than either entirely ignoring or suppressing a calling out of invalid science and contingent "friendly fire" criticism of the anti-plastics movement, for fear of such being utilized by the political opposition.
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Yes. It would help if the public is presented with how "early days" research is conducted and that flawed assays, and debates surrounding them, are just part of the routine of science when working in new territory.

Until we know more, there's no downside (except cost, in some cases) in having your water in refillable steel bottles, using metal, glass, and china in the kitchen, buying the mustard that comes in the glass jar, etc. Whatever the verdict on MNP in our tissue, there is no doubt that plastic waste is a noxious pollutant, and demonstrably harmful to marine life and some avian species. The petrochemicals industry is happy to drill down (ha) on this one area of new and scruffy research, because they know that the results on other aspects of plastic pollution are unambiguous.
 
Hallucinated citations produced by generative artificial intelligence may constitute research misconduct when citations function as data in scholarly papers
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2026.2645390#abstract

ABSTRACT: In this article, we discuss the growing problem of hallucinated citations produced by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in scholarly research and writing. We argue that GenAI hallucinated citations might qualify as a provable instance of research misconduct under the U.S. federal regulations when a) the researcher uses a GenAI tool to produce hallucinated (i.e., nonexistent) citations for a research document; b) the citations function as data because they directly support research findings, as in, for example, review articles or bibliometric studies; and c) the researcher demonstrates indifference to the risk of fabrication of the data (i.e. citations) because they did not check the GenAI’s output for veracity and accuracy.

Other types of problematic citations such as bibliometrically incorrect citations, or contextually inaccurate citations, are indicative of poor scholarship and irresponsible behavior, but do not qualify as research misconduct. Recognizing that GenAI hallucinated citations could be regarded as research misconduct in certain cases will hopefully encourage researchers to take this problem more seriously than they do now. In partnership with scientific institutions, funders and professional societies, the scholarly community should work on establishing, promoting, and enforcing standards for responsible use of AI in research, including standards pertaining to citation practices. (MORE - details)

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Research culture and integrity in Japan: A qualitative study
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-026-00591-2

ABSTRACT: There have been numerous instances of research and funding fraud by Japanese researchers that have discredited Japanese research, and thus ministries, universities and other institutions have attempted to prevent research misconduct and promote research integrity through measures such as policy amendments and education. However, it is unclear whether those measures have been effective, because research misconduct continues to occur.

In this study, we conducted focus group interviews with 25 participants, including both researchers and administrators, from various academic disciplines. The interviews were guided by seven semi-structured questions based on the Promoting Integrity as an Integral Dimension of Excellence in Research protocol. Our analysis of the resulting data identified 20 themes.

Regarding research integrity, participants highlighted boundary ambiguity and the need for a new definition. In relation to the research culture, the following barriers were identified: the laboratory environment, job security for junior researchers and middle-senior researchers, and pressures faced by principal investigators. In terms of policies, participants observed that research integrity regulations were not widely disseminated, and proposed several methods to provide education, including informational materials.

Regarding improvements to the current environment, participants mentioned performance evaluation, an open research environment, a supportive research environment, and sharing of previous cases. While numerous issues were raised, several solutions were also proposed. We found that gaining access to the collective knowledge of faculty, students, and administrators is the best way to foster a strong research culture and develop research integrity. (MORE - details)

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How to get there from here? Barriers and enablers on the road towards reproducibility in research
https://journal.trialanderror.org/pub/barriers-enablers/release/1?readingCollection=dfde1f5c

ABSTRACT: Reproducibility of research is a hotly debated topic, including aspects like causes and consequences of low levels of reproducibility. While some research fields have led the way and introduced various reproducibility practices and procedures, the call for efforts to ‘improve’ reproducibility in research has not come without criticisms.

The current study uses a future studies methodology to gather perceptions of developments in the research ecosystem related to reproducibility issues. It draws on input from representatives of four main stakeholder categories: scholarly publishers, funding agencies, qualitative social scientists and machine learning researchers.

Particularly, it discusses the enablers and barriers that members of these stakeholder communities foresee on the road towards a research ecosystem that is more conducive to reproducibility. The study finds that enablers and barriers can be categorised into five main clusters.

The factors most prominently mentioned as potentially supporting or hindering a desired future are located within research culture, including norms, values and shared definitions; and in the infrastructure required to engage in reproducibility practices, including repositories, support staff, and digital infrastructure. Three other clusters of factors put forth by participants relate to policy efforts required to incentivise reproducibility practices; training and education to empower researchers and support staff to engage in reproducibility practices; and the financial resources required to facilitate the transition towards a desired future and to specifically fund replication studies.

This manuscript also identifies several tensions between enablers and barriers perceived by diverse stakeholders and concludes with recommendations for addressing these. (MORE - details)
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Physicists flag over 50 papers on superheavy elements, leading to 3 retractions
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03...lements-leading-to-3-retractions/#more-134439

A physicist in India has accumulated three retractions and 13 expressions of concern for papers on superheavy elements after three researchers in the field began to flag issues with his work...

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How AI use in scholarly publishing threatens research integrity, lessens trust, and invites misinformation
https://thebulletin.org/premium/202...ity-lessens-trust-and-invites-misinformation/

EXCERPTS: Shortly after ChatGPT was released, it became clear that it was beginning to affect scholarly research. Published papers became much more likely to meticulously delve into intricate questions, and to do so with great enthusiasm, in ways they never had before. Distinctive quirks of large language model (LLM) writing such as these began to explode in popular usage, first in certain fields such as computer science or engineering, before spreading to other disciplines.

[...] In retrospect, this was not surprising. For many researchers, forced by the conventions of academia to publish in a second language, a tool that could help with fluent translation is a blessing. ... This is a perfect storm brewing for the integrity of scholarly publishing. The volume of significantly AI-generated material is increasing, and it is being masked by a flood of “AI polished” papers, which have the same surface style... (MORE - details)

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How ‘tiny shortcuts’ are poisoning science
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-tiny-shortcuts-are-poisoning-science/

EXCERPT: The public no longer believes that scientists merely make honest mistakes on the long and winding road to truth. Instead, scientists are increasingly seen as partial, ideological agents, activists in an armchair, or, worse still, simply fraudsters who fabricate or manipulate data and tweak the specifications of their empirical models to get their desired results.

The credibility crisis of science is not about scientific progress invalidating previously held scientific beliefs, which is intrinsic to the very nature of scientific revolutions. Rather, the crisis has been caused by scientists who deliberately publish overconfident, misleading, and often simply false empirical results based on research designs or model specifications they have intentionally specified to give the desired results.

We call this practice “tweaking.” In extreme cases, published results rely on manipulated or outright fabricated data. Whether tweaked, manipulated, or fabricated, the results often cannot be replicated — not even if replication analysts use identical research designs... (MORE - details)
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A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03...ints-arxiv-ssrn-citation-network/#more-134489

EXCERPT: What O’Brien, Liebel, Baltes and others ended up finding was a series of fake articles across multiple preprint servers, plagiarized from real articles and attributed to authors who don’t exist. These papers seem to be designed to inflate citation counts of someone being cited. But who uploaded them to the servers is unclear, and the researchers who benefit the most from the citations have denied any involvement, saying they themselves have flagged the articles to publishers... (MORE - details)

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The system that decides what science gets published is breaking down
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...what-science-gets-published-is-breaking-down/

EXCERPTS: It is important to understand that peer review has been wobbling for decades. But Gross, a statistician at North Carolina State University, sees the recent past as qualitatively different. Trends in the last five to ten years, he told me, "have really brought things to a head" resulted in widespread frustration among editors.

[...] When submissions to elite journals surge, the pool of qualified reviewers gets stretched thin. Editors must either recruit less experienced people or go back to the same reliable ones again and again. Review quality drops. Authors respond rationally: they take more chances, submitting to prestigious venues they might otherwise have ruled out. Submission volume rises. The cycle feeds itself.

[...] Two structural features make the problem especially stubborn. Peer review runs on unpaid labor, so the obvious lever of raising wages to increase supply is unavailable. And peer review serves a dual function: it sorts papers at a journal's editorial desk, but it also deters authors from submitting their weakest work in the first place. When review quality erodes, both functions degrade at once... (MORE - details)
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India is the global accelerant for antibiotic resistant bacteria
https://aeon.co/essays/antibiotic-resistance-in-india-has-consequences-everywhere

EXCERPTS: India is the accelerant of the global antimicrobial resistance crisis. Weak governance of pharmaceuticals, easy access to antibiotics, a high burden of infection driven by gaps in sanitation and health infrastructure, prolific antibiotic use in agriculture, and industrial pollution from pharmaceutical and other waste streams have combined to speed the rise and spread of resistant bacteria. In a connected world, those microbes and resistant genes will not remain local.

[...] Across India, antibiotics are regarded as ‘strong medicine’: a fast and familiar solution when there is neither time nor money for a proper diagnosis and medically supervised treatment. Decades of routine use by millions of Indians – rich and poor alike – have reinforced the sense that antibiotics work and are just part of day-to-day life. They are cheap, widely available through thousands of streetside pharmacies and, for most people, seemingly free of immediate side effects... (MORE - details)
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Only about half Of social science results can be replicated, finds new study
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/only-half-social-science-results-100000373.html

INTRO: A major, new examination of the replicability and reliability of published social and behavioral science experiments has found that only about half of previously published results can be replicated by new studies.

That’s one of the main conclusions from the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project, which involved an analysis of thousands of scientific studies published in 62 different journals between 2009 and 2018. The large-scale, international project was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The reanalyses focused on research in the fields of criminology, economics, educational science, health sciences, leadership, marketing, organizational behaviour, psychology, political science, public administration and sociology. The results are contained in three papers published this week in the highly respected journal Nature... (MORE - details)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09844-9

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-10078-y
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Can we trust the science shaping our lives?
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1124540

INTRO: Published in Nature, this scientific scrutiny led by Abel Brodeur, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, came alongside a massive seven-year international project assessing whether studies held up over time, particularly those without a universal scientific score. That study – the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project – reviewed nearly 4,000 social-science papers to find researchers couldn’t replicate the results in half of the studies they tested.

Brodeur’s work, however, provided more encouraging results. Brodeur employed a dual strategy. His team scrutinized papers at single-day events between 2022 and 2023. He ultimately reviewed 110 articles to discover 85 percent were computationally reproducible, an encouraging score amid a burgeoning climate of public distrust in scientific findings.

“We now have systematic, large-scale evidence on how reliable social science research really is,” explains Brodeur, founder of the Institute for Replication at the University of Ottawa. “The direct impact of this will see encouragement for higher research standards like better coding, data sharing, and general transparency so errors can be identified before they influence policy. Indirect impacts should lead to an improvement of trust in science by showing transparency and self-correction to help policymakers rely on more robust evidence.” (MORE - details, no ads)
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This was originally slain by a PBS documentary way back in the 1990s. There is some opportunistic do-gooder woo that is so noble appearing that you just can't keep it down. Doesn't even require slotting on Neo-Marxism's latest hot movement list of crusades against Western oppression.
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NBC and the NYT appear to be duped by a discredited technique: facilitated communication
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026...credited-technique-facilitated-communication/

EXCERPTS: Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words. [...] And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. [...] But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo.... (MORE - details)
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‘I asked him to stop’: Father adds daughter’s name to over 100 preprints without her permission
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/04...daughter-name-without-permission/#more-134705

An author in China with nearly 500 preprints has continued to add his daughter’s name to papers – despite her insistence she was not involved...

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‘Academic fraud may be the symptom of a much more systemic problem’
https://www.voxweb.nl/en/academic-fraud-may-be-the-symptom-of-a-much-more-systemic-problem

EXCERPT: A very understandable reaction to academic integrity violations is to view them as idiosyncratic, malicious actions of individuals. We shrug our shoulders and continue business as usual. I think it’s the wrong reaction. The real issue here is the misalignment of incentives with the desired outcomes. We get rewarded for telling simple and clean stories – preferably the kind of stories others want to hear...

[...] What we are not getting rewarded for, is being open about how complex, messy and uncertain research results can be. For articulating all those pesky assumptions our inferences are based on – or even for worrying about them too much ourselves. For showing how variable our results are, depending on the models we choose apply to our data. For being transparent about all the decisions we make as part of our scientific workflow, at best based on reasoned and reasonable trade-offs between practical feasibility and maximum rigor rather then self-serving opportunism.

For spending the time, effort and money needed for collecting high-quality data when there are cheaper short-cuts available. For showing the results of our analyses that don’t fit so nicely with the story. For admitting that the data are simply too noisy to provide a clear signal. For taking the time that is necessary to complete research projects that adhere to FAIR principles, rather than just pumping out another publication. For doing the kind of theoretical and empirical grunt work that is needed to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge instead of just telling interesting “new” stories... (MORE - details)
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Private health records of half a million Britons offered for sale on Chinese website
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...th-records-uk-biobank-chinese-website-alibaba

INTRO: The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.

The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed. It is not believed any sales were made.

The latest breach comes after the Guardian revealed last month that sensitive UK Biobank data has been exposed online dozens of times, raising further questions about whether security has been too lax... (MORE - details)
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PNAS publishes rank pseudoscience
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/pnas-publishes-rank-pseudoscience/

EXCERPT: Many experts who should know better are actively working against us, and actually supporting pseudoscience in medicine. This is due in part to a frustrating double standard in which regular medicine is held to a high standard, while “alternative” medicine has a standard all its own (functionally no standard).

The latest example of this disastrous double standard is a PNAS article on acupuncture. The article is completely gullible, written as if it were a promotional piece entirely by advocates, without a hint of critical thinking or skepticism. It is also internally inconsistent, even incoherent, but does usefully give the game away for those paying attention, especially with a background in SBM. The author is Lynne Peeples, a journalist, not a scientist. This makes sense in that the piece reads like a feature, with a typical narrative structure, not like an academic review or even opinion... (MORE - details)
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The triumph of ego depletion
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-triumph-of-ego-depletion

EXCERPTS: Social psychologists had begun to criticize their own field, saying that many findings could not be replicated in other labs. [...] the vultures quickly came out and proclaimed ego depletion to be a fake. [...] As usual, the public and the media don’t correct themselves ... it has a pretty good record with multi-lab replications, including two complete successes, and two partial successes.

[...] this fits the conclusion that ego depletion is extremely well replicated, better than almost anything else in social psychology. ... Ego depletion continues to be attacked. My impression is that this mainly comes from people who can’t get their own theories to work and so try to build themselves up by tearing down the honest hard work of other people...

[...] I don’t mind scientists who question ego depletion. Questioning everything is what a good scientist does. But I cannot imagine any competent, honest scientist looking at all that evidence and saying “no, there’s nothing there.” Anyone who seriously believes that ego depletion is not real is dismissing an enormous amount of research.

With the new, recently published multi-lab replication of ego depletion, the case should be settled. The effect is real and, if properly done, is something that goes beyond a small effect to a medium or large one... (MORE - details)
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Is the scientific paper due to be replaced?
https://www.thetransmitter.org/from...e-is-the-scientific-paper-due-to-be-replaced/

EXCERPTS: People in science have sensed this change coming for a while. In early 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT’s launch, I sat in a meeting where one of the most prominent scientists at my institution speculated that AI may eventually force a rethinking of what a scientific paper even is.

[...] What would this look like in practice for a neuroscience lab? One version: You submit a paper the way you always have, but alongside it you deposit your claims and results in a structured format, each linked to specific figures, statistical tests and datasets. Reviewers evaluate individual results rather than trying to hold the whole manuscript in their heads. Related results across papers get discovered automatically, including in papers you’ve never read and that don’t cite each other.

In Eisen’s version, even the narrative layer becomes dynamic: Instead of a fixed paper, the reader queries the structured record and gets results tailored to their question and expertise. The paper becomes an interface, generated on demand. In the more radical version, the paper becomes optional altogether, a “narrative view” of structured knowledge objects. This structure could have valuable implications for publication bias. If the primary scientific record exists in the network and professionally meaningful credit is assigned that way, then a single careful replication or a precisely stated negative result counts toward career advancement rather than languishing, unpublished, on someone’s computer for years... (MORE - details)
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