"The FoSci Report 2026: Understanding, Detecting, and Documenting Manipulation in the Research Ecosystem"
In this report, 17 authors – among them scholarly sleuths and investigators of science, from academia and industry – come together to present a primer on the field of forensic scientometrics.
#research #science #scientometrics #forensics #researchFraud
New (at least for me) term alert!
TORTURED PHRASE: An established scientific concept paraphrased into a nonsensical sequence of words. "Mean square error" becomes "mean square blunder". "Breast cancer" becomes "Bosom peril". Sign of fraudulent research. Can be a product of AI technologies.
Many fraudulent scientific papers contain "tortured phrases," standard scientific terms paraphrased into gibberish. Breast cancer is a scary disease, but what is bosom peril? These phrases are likely popping up because scientists, to boost their article count, are running texts through paraphrasing software, which helps them avoid plagiarism accusations. And new AI technologies may be crafting some article text from whole cloth.
Retraction Watch: Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says. “Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating, according to a study of problematic publishing practices and the networks that fuel them.”
A powerful new study (Richardson et al., @PNASNews 2025) reveals the scale of systematic research fraud: fake papers are doubling every 1.5 years - ten times faster than real science. Retractions and deindexing can't keep up. Journals look away. Universities stay silent. Ministries protect their own.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122
The authors call for independent, conflict-free structures with real power to act.
#ResearchFraud #ScientificIntegrity #PaperMills #AcademicEthics
Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-scientific-fraud-is-suddenly-everywhere.html
No surprise (I'm currently dealing with other kinds of research scammers), but still OOF.
https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/the-ai-is-eating-itself
New blog post! There's a version of this on Psychology Today, but I got some weird edits, so I wanted to have a "version of record" here.
This one is about how the President of Stanford allegedly falsified Alzheimer's research, has been called out on it for over 2 decades, and continues to "fail up."
Comments here are welcome.
@socialpsych
@cognition
@neuroscience
MottG
Aleksandra Lazić, PhD
ResearchBuzz: Firehose
Serhii Nazarovets
Katherine Stiles 🔬
Lowlife's inane ramblings 🦜☠
Auscandoc
Chris J. Karr
Alex Danvers