Case studies in scientific reproducibility

Businesses have emerged that sell authorship to aspiring doctors to make their residency applications more competitive.

Reese Richardson

Science

and

 Retraction Watch

just released a large investigation into what I consider a new breed of paper mill.

A new breed of paper mill targeting international medical graduates

There is a new market for academic fraud: selling fake patents.

To better understand research paper mills, predatory publishers and other players in the scientific gray market, I spend a lot of time in shady Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp groups where businesses in these markets advertise their services. These groups will often disappear without notice when subjected to outside scrutiny, so I will not link to any one of them directly so as not to upset their delicate habitats.

Patently fraudulent

Collecting arguments on the stigma surrounding retraction

Header image by Sydney Richardson.

On June 5, head of Research Integrity and Resolutions at Springer Nature Tim Kersjes presented “Requiem for the Retraction: why proposals for ‘honest retractions’ fail in their objective to promote and encourage the self-correction of science” at the 2024 World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI). Included was the following slide, later shared by Maria Zalm, senior editor and team manager of

How shameful should retraction be?

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Metascience 2023 in Washington D.C. about a strategy research paper mills can use to thwart science integrity measures: journal hopping. You can find the talk below:  If you would like to learn more about research paper mills, I suggest starting with our 2022 review about paper mills in human gene research.

Journal hopping by research paper mills after a preferred journal is de-indexed (Metascience 2023)

There may be hundreds of papers out there reporting on experimental results in cell lines that do not actually exist.

A cell line is a population of cells that can be grown in a laboratory culture indefinitely.

Non-verifiable cell lines: immortal or imaginary?

An excerpt from my newly-defended PhD dissertation.

The following is an excerpt from the preface of my newly-defended PhD dissertation in Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences, titled “Metascientific studies in reproducibility, bias and fraud”.
 
 
 2 out of 4 chapters of my thesis have been published/preprinted: “Understudied genes are lost in a leaky pipeline between genome-wide assays and reporting of results” and “Widespread misidentification of SEM instruments in the

The scientific enterprise is a human enterprise

“Salami slicing” is the practice of taking a set of research findings and splitting them up into as many publishable papers as possible. It is typically regarded as a tactic to inflate the authors’ CVs.

Recent encounters with atom-thin salami slicing

A citation manipulation scheme so easy, even a cat can do it.

Before we get to the adventures of

 Felis domesticus scholasticus

promised by the title, some important background. A couple of weeks ago, Nick Wise showed me an advertisement from a paper mill offering to boost the buyer’s citation count and h-index on their Google Scholar profile. The advertisement links to several success stories consisting of unredacted “before” and “after” screenshots of clients’ Google Scholar profiles.

Engineering the world’s highest cited cat, Larry

Could the fraudulent work of one researcher be responsible for the rise of curcumin research?

Bharat B. Aggarwal is an Indian-American biochemist who worked at MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1989 to 2015. His research focused on potential anti-cancer effects and therapeutic applications of herbs and spices. Aggarwal was particularly drawn to curcumin, a non-toxic compound found in turmeric that has long been staple in Ayurvedic systems of medicine. He authored more than 120 articles about the compound from 1994 to 2020.

The King of Curcumin: a case study in the consequences of large-scale research fraud

Today, our article “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly” was published in

 PNAS

. The article will only be fully open-access in six months (damn you, publishing fees), but I’ve made the PDF available here (you can download the supplementary materials on the

 PNAS

page). I’ll use this blog post to summarize and opine (what I write here reflects my own thinking about this study

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise

What an minor Wikipedia incident can teach us about the role of authority in the creation of truth

In 2017, Wikipedia editor WikiDan61 changed the flag on Vatican City as it appears on the site, noting that “[all] images of actual Vatican City flags show the “gold” in the keys and tiara rendered in the same hue as the gold/yellow band of the flag, as well as a red opening at the bottom of the tiara”.  However, according to the 2000 revision of the Fundamental Law of Vatican City State, this version of the flag was incorrect.

Truth, authority and the flag of Vatican City

Detailing yet another citation manipulation scheme in Google Scholar

Almost one year on from Larry Richardson becoming Google Scholar’s highest cited cat, a year and change after Ibrahim et al. released a pre-print (now published) showing that Google Scholar is eminently manipulable and a full

 15 years

after fictitious personality Ike Antkare became one of the most highly-cited scientists of all time, Google Scholar still appears to have done absolutely nothing to curb citation manipulation on

Google Scholar is (still) doing nothing about citation manipulation

A comprehensive starting point for performing post-publication peer review.

I am beyond thrilled to introduce the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG), a community-led open source resource for performing post-publication peer review. At the end of this post, I’ve reproduced a commentary I wrote explaining the motivation behind COSIG and how we hope that it will be used.

Introducing COSIG: the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides

A review of a recent anti-vaccine preprint

I have lots of to-do items on my plate lately, so naturally I have been distracted by the latest anti-vaccine bullshit. The regular crowd is abuzz with the news of a new study preprinted on preprints.org, a platform owned by MDPI.