Anna Abalkina

BP: sleuths are people who have too much time to look at misconduct in papers

AF3. Journals are rotten at core. We need entirely new system. And it is not a journal article.

AF2: Peer review is not transparent gatekeepers thing. Peer review requires different types of specialists. Methods can be published separately and peer reviewed by a methods expert. Decisions in journals are taken by few people who are biased (like all humans)

AF1: how many articles can be absolutely reproduced? How many articles have you not published? A journal requires a nice story, a narrative. But this is not how research is done. One of possible consequences are QRP.

Alexandra Freeman, Octopus. Why a format of an article is not how it should be done?

Journals are gatekeepers of quality control which is provided by peer review. Journals prefilter information. And peer review can be weaponized. But good journals know how deal with that. Transparency is important. But credit for peer review is still missing.

Publishing is a victim of research assessment.

Berlin Science Week. Oxford-style debate. Should we publish in academic journals?

New descriptive statistics tables in T&F journals produced by a paper mill. Do you notice anything wrong with them?
#papermills

I'm very grateful to DomainTools for providing access to their instruments to analyse web domains. Thanks to this tool I have just found two hijacked journals which will be added to the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker during the next update.

It's already 3 years since I'm looking at Tanu.pro paper mill. Tanu.pro is an email domain that the paper mill used to submit papers. When this fraud was detected, the paper mill abandoned it and it expired. Now I found that the domain is registered again in an anonymous registrar in Reykjavik.

The study which, I believe, is from a paper mill that I'm looking at, publishes this kind of table. Negative values of GDP (in the paper it's GDP but not a growth rate), strange SD values, negative interest rates (which can be in the case of Japan but min should be -0.1 but not -0.03). #papermills

Sightseeing day around Germany! Such wonderful weather, and I found a treasure, the city of Tangermünde, right in the heart of Germany.

Happy to be in the Tagesspiegel office which hosts 100 scientists of Berlin and Brandenburg of 2025.

probably, they submitted the wrong file. or celebrities didn't reply to their questionnaire, so no data, no results. (paper is devoted to celebrity entrepreneurship).

True. Taking in consideration the language in the conclusions and methods, there is no sign of ChatGPT.

The paper mill probably forgot to include several sections in the paper, including the data and results. The Methods section mentions a survey that is never described in the paper. Immediately after the methods section comes the conclusion. Yet, the paper was still published.

Finally I get invitations from hijacked journals to publish with them. It will go immediately to Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Please, send me more.

Thanks, Dimity!

Thank you! More projects to come!

Thanks!

I’m honored to be named one of Tagesspiegel’s “100 Researchers of Berlin” for 2025, featured in today’s category “Swimming against the current.” Grateful to be recognized alongside inspiring researchers who challenge convention and push boundaries

There’s a striking pattern among the top journals targeted by an Indian paper mill. All have sharply increased their publication number in recent years.
Is this growth driven by publisher goals, a surge in submissions due to AI, or both?
#papermills

I found a watermark of an Indian paper mill, which helped me identify 100+ papers over the weekend. So far, 490 papers have been detected. Most authors are from India, China, and Saudi Arabia. Only 4 papers have been retracted. Papers are full of fake data, yet they still get published. #papermills

Yes!

It's likely a paper from a paper mill. It uses chatgpt to produce papers, I guess. 2 columns spotted! There is also smth else.

How many and what kind of mistakes can you spot in this table?

Exactly! it was the end of the table. no other universities mentioned!

that was the end of the table in the paper.

yes. arithmetically correct. mean = (max + min)/2. sd=max - mean.