@gcabanac.cpesr.fr
‘Deception Sleuth’ #Nature10 Scientist go.nature.com/3B29NgY • CS Prof. Univ. Toulouse @IUFrance.bsky.social • Metascience + Scientific Text Mining • https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac @gcabanac at X @gcabanac@sciences.re at Mastodon
We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record."
Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...
Stealth corrections are still a threat to scientific integrity. If you are not familiar with stealth corrections, please read this.
This guest post is on @deevybee.bsky.social's blog and is authored by from René Aquarius, Floris Schoeters, Alex Glynn and @gcabanac.cpesr.fr
buff.ly/t8fWFZq
NOUVEL EP - Comment devient-on un "détective" de la #science ?
Avec @gcabanac.cpesr.fr, prof. à l'Université de Toulouse et concepteur du "Problematic Paper Screener".
youtu.be/pNdLmsXDVn0
We wrote a 1-year update post on stealth corrections. Thank you @deevybee.bsky.social for hosting it.
We also wrote a @cosig.net guide to make reporting stealth corrections more streamlined
cc: @gcabanac.cpesr.fr
📰 David Adam reports for Nature News on our Replication Initiative
"A European project calls for help to verify whether carbon quantum dots are really able to sense chemicals in cells."
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
@nature.com
Iranians are experiencing a collective trauma. Thousands have been killed/injured in recent events, the economy is crippled & the threat of a wider conflict is real. This is especially difficult for those living in Iran, as many have lost (or fear losing) loved ones. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Red YT wtf circle around the black and white image of a fish with a big black eye. It's a predaceous chub.
🧪 Here's a science mystery to start the year.
Why are species names for fish and plants appearing in the scientific literature in papers about firefighter injuries, hearing loss and heart attack?
Is it AI? Translation tools? Something else?
nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/is-this-fi...
📣 Interested in 🫧 and AI?
➡️ AISB 2026 Symposium titled Hype, Promise, and Speculation: AI Bubbles and the Replication Crisis in Computer Science will take place on 1-2 July 2026 in Sussex, UK.
🕐 Deadline for submissions is 6 March 2026
🔗 For more information aisb.org.uk/aisb-2026-sy...
STS NL CONFERENCE 2026 banner with the track proposal titled 'Making Science Better?'
📣 Submit to our track 'Making Science Better?' at the STS NL Conference which will take place in Twente from April 15 to 17, 2026! More details in the link below.
🔗 www.utwente.nl/en/bms/sts-n...
"It might be easy to dismiss the idea of ISO 9001 as just another tool to encourage best practice among publishers. But journal certification would fill a long-standing gap in the chain of external oversight from conduct to translation of research."
@jabyrnesci.bsky.social writes in @nature.com !
Springer Nature retracting papers based on bonkers dataset
www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/e... Good. #autism
Ma conférence « Dépolluer la littérature scientifique » donnée lors de la cérémonie d'installation de la 35e promotion de l'@IUFrance.bsky.fr est désormais en ligne > www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMA...
“I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”
Happy Advent! !!!🎄✨
Welcome to a new edition of the Research Integrity Advent Calendar.
Each day brings a small challenge: spot the problem, detect inconsistencies, and sharpen your skills.
Enjoy the season and the daily puzzles!
Day 1. papermills.tilda.ws/advent2025
i’m going to have to stop scrolling through Scientific Reports contents before I go insane
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
ADHD in dogs? 🙀
5️⃣4️⃣ Elisabeth Bik (1966- ) 🇳🇱 #womeninSTEM @elisabethbik.bsky.social Microbiologist, she worked on cholera epidemics in India & Bangladesh. Internationally recognised for her work in detecting image manipulation. 2021 Maddox Prize & 2024 Einstein Foundation award.
www.statnews.com/2024/02/28/e...
Good morning!
Today is a day ending in "y", which means I found another mathematically-impossible Table of Summary Statistics in a peer-reviewed "green economics" paper!
What can you see? 🔎
#FablesofFlummeryStatistics
OpenAlex intégré au Web of Science, ou la capture du travail des “commoners” | carnetist.hypotheses.org/2572
1. Tortured phrases This paper contains several tortured phrases. Observed phrase Expected phrase population development population growth natural debasement environmental degredation Stochastic Effects of Relapse on Popular and Technology (STIRPAT) Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) productive indication useful predictor F-score F-stat t-score t-stat promotion investment best-guess estimates point estimates (?) conversation valuation reports reported summary statistics (?)
In fact, there are several tortured phrases in this paper.
My favourite:
"Stochastic Effects of Relapse on Popular and Technology (STIRPAT)"
which should be:
"Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT)"
Pour les personnes intéressées : le diapo de mon exposé un peu plus long que ma conférence récente mentionnée par Caroline, donnée auprès des collègues @IUFrance.bsky.social : “Fake Science: Misconduct Galore and Proposed Counterattack” hal.science/hal-04225515... VF ds les versions HAL précédentes.
Scène de la vie académique ordinaire dans le tgv
Un chercheur voisin (qui n'a pas mis de filtre de confidentialité sur son écran)
Est en train de rédiger un long mail d'explications pour répondre à deux co autrices qui lui reprochent très vivement d'avoir écrit sa section d'article avec une IA
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
Je tiens les maisons d'édition pour responsables. Elles publient et parfois vendent de la pollution : des articles toxiques. LinkedIn me permet d'atteindre les décideurs de ces publishers et les représentants institutionnels. Du délire... 😵💫 voici quelques extraits : www.linkedin.com/in/guillaume...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumecabanac/recent-activity
Je tiens les maisons d'édition pour responsables. Elles publient et parfois vendent de la pollution : des articles toxiques. LinkedIn me permet d'atteindre les décideurs de ces publishers et les représentants institutionnels. Du délire... 😵💫 voici quelques extraits : www.linkedin.com/in/guillaume...
😭
An international computing society has begun retracting conference papers for “citation falsification” only months after the sleuth who flagged the suspect articles was convicted for defamation in a lawsuit filed by one of the offending authors.
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
36 cites to the same author? Retracted.
59 of them? Not retracted!
4 self-cites? Retracted.
21 self-cites? Not retracted!
70 unused cites to the same author? Retracted.
77 of them? Not retracted!
Plagiarism? Cites authors didn't add? 113 cites to the TPC chair in a 0.5-page paper? Not retracted!
🟢 Vos revues profanées
Des revues de référence qui se mettent à publier en masse des articles louches et à augmenter leur frais de publication ? Au moins sept revues françaises seraient passées aux mains d’obscurs éditeurs. On vous explique 👇
themeta.news/linvasion-de...
#VeilleESR
Articles with tortured phrases
I invite @acm.org to review their articles with Tortured Phrases dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p... (not the first time I'm doing so, here and on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/posts/guilla...)