Early May, I attended the 2026 World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This conference is held every two years. In 2024, I went to the WCRI in Athens, Greece, and in 2022 to the one in Cape Town, South Africa. In this post, I will provide a short summary and links to my BlueSky #WCRI2026 posts for all the sessions I attended.
An overview of general news and articles about science integrity and some cases that I have worked on.
The US Office of Research Integrity updated its regulations on handling research misconduct allegations. Key updates include clarifying the inquiry process and adjusting how institutions should handle the allegations and record the process.
James Heathers published a preprint arguing that the old, often-cited number that 2% of papers are fake is outdated and a vast underestimate. In a new preprint, he argues it might be 1 in 7 papers, based on 12 studies that together analyze 75,000 scientific articles.
Your monthly digest of science integrity news.
Hindawi — and its parent company, Wiley — have recently announced that they will retract hundreds of papers from journals targeted by paper mills. The papers were all published in ‘special issues’, with the guest editors being either asleep at the wheel or perhaps knowingly looking the other way.
In this blog post, I will take an in-depth look at some of these papers.
Previously I wrote about the Tadpole Paper Mill and the Stockphoto Paper Mill papers. Paper Mills are companies that sell fake or plagiarized scientific papers to authors who need them for their career. Certain countries have strict requirements or monetary incentives for medical doctors, graduate students, or other researchers to publish papers. In such countries, other researchers or business folks have found creative ways of making money by selling fake papers to researchers. Such paper mills are similar to essay mills where ghostwriters offer their services to undergraduate students.
Paper mill papers sometimes can be recognized because they are written based on templates or by recycling the same photos. A particular set of papers might contain the same remarkable typo, western blots with the same background, similar title structures, the same erroneous gene sequence, unrealistic flow cytometry plots, or recycled electron microscopy photos.
Other paper mills operate by working together with journal editors responsible for ‘special issues’ who will review and accept low-quality submissions where authors have been added for payment.
Countless hours have been put into finding such linked sets of papers by volunteers such as Smut Clyde, Tiger, Jennifer Byrne, Jana Christopher, and Anna Abalkina. Here, we will look at a slightly different paper mill.
Continue reading “The Iranian Plant Paper Mill”Citations lend credibility to a scientific paper. And sometimes even result in a cash bonus. But while most researchers just hope their paper will be cited by others, some authors have found more ‘creative’ ways of getting their papers noticed. A recent comment on PubPeer offers a glimpse behind the scenes.
Continue reading “Citation Statistics and Citation Rings”A short post highlighting a small set of papers (currently five) that all share some interesting features. As before, these might all have been produced by the same paper-writing entity, a so-called “paper mill”.
Similar to the Tadpole paper set, where all Western blot panels showed the same background noise, most wound healing assay photos in this mini-mill share the same microscope irregularities. And all of them describe a group of 48 patients.
While working on the larger “Tadpole” and “Stock Photo” paper set, plenty of other papers with similar title and layout structure were found that appeared to belong to different sets.
In this post, I will present to you the “Effect” paper set, uncovered by super-spotter Hoya Camphorifolia (a pseudonym).
I called this set the “Effect” set because about half of the papers’ titles start with “Effect of” or “Effects of”.
As with other paper sets suspected of being produced by a paper mill, this group of papers are all authored by different research groups at different hospitals, studying different animal models and therapeutics. Yet, they all share at least one image with each other.
Continue reading “The “Effect” Paper Mill”A small thread on Twitter (now deleted) pointed me to the website YMGrad.com, “Your Gateway to Study Abroad“. The site promises to help students be admitted to graduate schools at top universities worldwide.
One of the services offered on the site is paid authorship on a paper – without the students needing to do any research.
That sounds a lot like a paper mill to me.
“Are you looking to buy your own custom-made scientific paper? You have come to the right place. We are the Stock Photo Paper Mill! You can pick and choose all kinds of great items from our pool of stock photos to create your own paper. We have photos featuring colony formation, wound healing, and transwell assays. We have survival plots and flow cytometry panels too! Just pick what you like from our catalog, and we will turn your selection into your own, unique paper. “
A hypothetical commercial for a paper mill.
Stock photos are photos that you can pick and buy from a catalog. Some sites even offer free stock photos. Stock photos are often used by new sites and bloggers to illustrate their stories. Some photos can even be funny, especially if they depict models pretending to be professionals. On MicrobiomeDigest.com I have several blog posts about laboratory stock photo fails that might make you smile.
Here I will discuss the Stock Photo Papers, a set of 121 papers, almost exclusively published in the same scientific journal. The papers all have different authors from different institutions, and describe different cancer types and tissue samples.
However, although each of these papers looks unique at first glance, all papers in this set contain images from the same library of about 100 photos and plots. Like images in a stock photo library, each of these photos was used multiple times in different papers. My findings, covered by Eva Xiao in the Wall Street Journal, suggest that they were all created by the same paper mill.
TLDR: Links to the list of 121 papers: [English] Google Sheet – PDF – Excel format
Update 7/7/2020: Links added to list of papers in Chinese – with big thanks to TigerBB8 for the translation and for adding the grants: [Chinese] PDF
Continue reading “The Stock Photo Paper Mill”
Science Integrity Digest 