Christel Hellberg

Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud Science sleuths share their common-sense tips for sniffing out fishy articles.

@sjmelchor.bsky.social writes for @nature.com about how to spot dubious papers, interviewing @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @abalkina.bsky.social, @jabyrnesci.bsky.social, myself and and my fellow @cosig.net maintainers @solalpirelli.bsky.social and Yagmur Ozturk!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A screenshot of a footnote 'this was once revealed to me in a dream'

I'll never get tired of using this example, it's just perfect.

Post a picture you took to bring some zen to the timeline

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

Publisher flags more than 120 papers three and a half years after learning of problems What started as a small editorial conundrum several years ago has turned into an expression of concern for dozens of papers in a medical journal, thanks to the work of an Australian physician and s…

A Retraction Watch story left one reader intrigued. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said John Loadsman of the University of Sydney, an anesthesiologist and journal editor. “I thought, I’ve got to have a look.”

Inclusion of Retracted Studies in Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Interventions This systematic review and meta-analysis identifies reports of systematic reviews that included retracted studies in their meta-analyses, and assesses the impact of these retracted studies on the resu...

A pleasingly meta-meta-analysis with a very displeasing outcome: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Tiden passar er i Sverige som är intresserade!

Mallen INSPECT‑SR syftar till att bedöma risken för att randomiserade kontrollerade studier (RCT:er) är opålitliga eller problematiska.

Bayesian Thinking for Toddlers: The Cartoon For better or for worse, it appears that my most appreciated work is the children’s book Bayesian Thinking for Toddlers (the intro post is here and an exegesis is here). Piled up in my office…

Bayesian Thinking for Toddlers -- now as a cartoon, courtesy of @viktorbeekman.bsky.social

You can read the cartoon at www.bayesianspectacles.org/bayesian-thi...

Are you a CEEDER or CEESAT user?

We’re updating the CEE Synthesis Appraisal Tool (CEESAT) and are seeking volunteers to join our Advisory Group! If you have suggestions for improving CEESAT, please consider volunteering. Inquiries due 16 Feb 2026.
➡️ More info: bit.ly/4arA0YG

#EvidenceSynthesis

LESSS 2026 - Register Register Now for LESSS 2026 June 15-18, 2026 11:30am - 3:30pm

#medlibs and #evidencesynthesis nerds - the next Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium (LESSS) is upon us and open for free registration 😊 sites.google.com/view/lesss/r...

New tool exposes scale of fake research flooding cancer science A new machine learning tool has identified more than 250,000 cancer research papers that may have been produced by so-called “paper mills”.

www.qut.edu.au/news?id=203173

RegCheck V2 is out:
App: regcheck.app
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2601.13330
Codebase: github.com/JamieCummins...

Låt inte de dåliga sakerna få dig att glömma att världen alltid är KNÖKFULL av samarbete, vettig medmänsklighet och kärlekens alla olika sorters ansikten.

Trying to work out why all peer reviewers of systematic reviews now suggest including every sensitivity analysis ever devised (do a leave-one-out, do a sequential analysis, do p-curve, how about some outlier detection?) Is the answer ‘they are all now written by LLMs?’

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

Thrilled that @shreyadimri.bsky.social & I will be part of #LoveMethods26!

We'll present on "How to avoid common problems in #SystematicReviews & #MetaAnalyses"

📅 Jan 19–23, 2026 | FREE | All online

Everyone's invited to join the entire week of workshops!

🔗 excelscior.uc.pt/love-methods...

‪
Meta-analysis in R (2nd edition) — registrations open 🚀
Hands-on systematic reviews & modern meta-analysis in R with
@asanchez-tojar.bsky.social & @shreyadimri.bsky.social
📅11–14 May 2026| Online |Ecology & evolution
www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...
#MetaAnalysis #SystematicReview #Rstats

Happy Advent!🎄
Day 24
Ready for a new puzzle? A case from a paper that was published some days ago
papermills.tilda.ws/2025advent24
papermills.tilda.ws/advent2025
This is the last case of 2025. I hope you enjoyed the calendar as much as I enjoyed preparing it, and I wish you warm seasonal greetings!

YouTube video by Good News Your Yearly Dose of Good News (2025)

Treat yourself to “Your yearly dose of good news” (renewables surpass coal; largest marine protected area; green corridor in Congo; endangered species bounce back; etc): youtu.be/X8ZD7nTQ5iI?...

A Forrest showing the sun shining through the branches

Finally some sun ☀️.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Doug Altman was an internationally renowned statistician who served as The BMJ’s chief statistical adviser.

Read about life and work that made this statistician a "citation millionaire"
#BMJChristmas
www.bmj.com/content/391/...

The proliferation of fake citations in real scholarship reveals a critical flaw in how we “produce knowledge.” No matter how valid a claim is or not, once introduced into the literature, it can persists and spread like an invasive rhizome. This isn’t new, but the audacity of AI makes it apparent.

The fact that a journal claims an article is "peer-reviewed" is not good enough evidence for you, the reader or citer, to give an impression that there was meaningful review or that the article is trustworthy.

That would be poor research, unscientific, if there is little or no supporting evidence.

Happy Advent! !!!🎄✨
Day 15.
Ready for a new puzzle? This is one of my favorite cases of 2025.
papermills.tilda.ws/advent2025

Fake DOI-like strings are increasingly common. Learn how to check whether a DOI is valid, how prefixes work, and more. https://tinyurl.com/599yk8yv

#metadata #research #funders #librarians #community

New study from IQWiG: You can do without searching Embase for drug studies – though that could change if something drastic happened to PubMed.

(Currently only in German.)

#MedLibs

Continuing the fine tradition of declining to review for Nature Publishing Group, in my case @natmentalhealth.nature.com for all the fine reasons Alex descibed in this letter. The APC for this journal is £9190.00/$12690.00/€10690.00. Join us!

Detsamma hände i Stockholm när Samtrans tog över. Det var ett helvete!

Uppmaningen: Lämna Elon Musks plattform EU:s miljardbot mot X har utlöst raseri i USA. Nu uppmanar forskaren Carl Heath politiker och myndigheter att lämna plattformen. ”USA har för avsikt att utöva påverkan – X är inte längre en neutral pl...

Mycket bra! www.svd.se/a/16kjgG/elo...