@katarinazimmer.bsky.social wrote a nice article on review-milling, including Rabiul Awual, who I consider a prime example: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

‘A waste of time for all of us’: caught in the crossfire of the peer-review wars

Review mills — researchers who write fake referee reports with coercive citation requests — are setting off a war in academic publishing. What happens to those caught in the middle?

nature.com

One could think it's crazy that you can get away with faking flow-cytometry plots for 15 years. Szczepanska et al. 2012 (DOI: 10.1007/s11033-011-0895-y), cited 81 times... Retracted after all: link.springer.com/article/10.1... (A collaborative effort with Aneurus inconstans)

Fortunately the journal agreed that MSpaint is not an acceptable research software & this article has now been retracted: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · last yr.

When you like to fake your flow-cytometry plots but don't know how to align plots in your pdf editor, then you get dumbsterfires like this: Chong et al. 2012 (DOI: 10.1186/1472-6882-12-134), BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies #ImageForensics pubpeer.com/publications...

This junk has finally been retracted. Only took 13 months.... pubpeer.com/publications... One of many papers by the PI's lab that should get retracted. Some have been 'corrected' in the last year.

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · last yr.

(9/x) Following that, we saw more of the same well established MO in 2017 and 2019: Folk et al. 2017 (DOI: 10.1177/1559325817703461) pubpeer.com/publications... & Dinescu et al. 2019 (DOI: 10.3390/ijms20205077) pubpeer.com/publications...

"The authors disagree with the retraction" 🤡 I agree with the retraction. Looks a bit like a collage I made in in pre-school... Sharif et al. 2022 (DOI: 10.1155/2022/6530095) pubpeer.com/publications...

Deng-Guang Yu's research was too flawed even for Frontiers. MDPI however does allowed these fraudsters to correct the same type of errors: pubpeer.com/publications... Not surprising but just highlighting why you should never publish there. More on D.G. Yu: forbetterscience.com/2025/03/03/a...

A stupid and foolish question

“Those noises have no scientific meanings, suggest nothing, forming no any judgments, and have no any influences on the experimental results. ” – Professor Deng‐Guang Yu

forbetterscience.com

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Shanghai-based Deng-Guang Yu just lost his 2nd paper (~100 flagged on PubPeer). It was reported to Frontiers in February & recycled data originally published in 2013 by Yu's team: Wang et al. 2023 (DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2023.1184767) pubpeer.com/publications... forbetterscience.com/2025/03/03/a...

Ch et al. 2023 was finally retracted. I reported this paper in Feb 2025. The journal allowed the authors to correct but the 'corrected' figures were once again littered with mistakes. 10 months later it was finally retracted.... (pubpeer.com/publications...)

Good to see Wiley retracting this abomination of a research paper: Al-Rawaf et al. 2019 (DOI: 10.1155/2019/4352470). It took one year for my complaint to get this addressed, but at least they made the correct decision in the end. pubpeer.com/publications... #ResearchIntegrity

Some might remember this story I wrote last year about the Northumbria University professor Zhanhu Guo and his unethical practices, engagement with papermillers, etc.: forbetterscience.com/2025/04/15/a... Guo has left Northumbria University 'with immediate effect'.

An unethical guide to 100.000 citations

“”A number of leading researchers have published their research contributions at this Journal among them Zhanhu Guo, Zhanhu Guo, Zhanhu Guo,….”

forbetterscience.com

Arguably the funniest excuse by authors ever explaining their manipulated XRD: artifacts introduced by using the machine as a printer??. Unfortunately, this was too ridiculous even for 'Scientific Reports' and the study was retracted this week: pubpeer.com/publications...

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · last yr.

Made-up XRD by Ahmadi et al. 2024 (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-80596-8) in 'Scientific Reports'. The authors explained on PubPeer that because of sanctions on Iran they had to use their XRD machine as a printer and that explains the repetitive noise. Sounds legit to me! pubpeer.com/publications...

'Aquaculture Reports' recently retracted Rashid et al. 2024 (10.1016/j.aqrep.2024.102100): pubpeer.com/publications... Notable co-authors include papermiller Shafaqat Ali and a University of California Santa Cruz researcher. It's one of more than a dozen problematic papers coauthored by the pair.

This nonsense finally was retracted today: Even the title is an absolute mess in my eye, but the photoshop art (disguised as histology images) is what was the nail in the coffin. It just took 15 months to retract it, which is actually fast for Springer at this point...

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · 2y ago

(1/2) Another photoshop "masterpiece" in 'Oriental Pharmacy and Experimental Medicine': Srivastava et al. 2019 (DOI: 10.1007/s13596-018-0345-7). Figure 3 is a complete mess of cropped image pieces. I have marked some of the clearly copy-pasted regions, but there is many more. #ResearchIntegrity

And that's retraction no. 3 for Novaes, Gonçalves, et al., (2018) exactly 1 year since reporting my concerns to Elsevier's 'Environmental Polution'. pubpeer.com/publications... This paper does not involve the postdoc supposedly responsible for the fraud in the first two...

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Another retraction, for concerns that I reported in February. Wiley even credited me in the note (that's a first)!: Sarandry et al. 2015 (DOI: 10.1155/2015/919342) reused data published years prior + most of the newly presented data consisted of overlapping images... pubpeer.com/publications...

Retraction from this week: pubpeer.com/publications... Authors published two manuscripts (quasi-) simultaneously and used the same dataset to represent different work. I caught it by eye because the articles appeared right after each other in the same journal when I was scrolling through the volume

I was recently interviewed by German journalist Florian Sturm about my sleuthing work for a podcast episode: www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/urn:... (it's unfortunately only available in German language)

Podcast: Massenhaft Fake-Studien durch KI (2) - So arbeiten Wissenschaftsdetektive

KI macht es Paper Mills leichter denn je, wissenschaftliche Arbeiten zu fälschen. Immer wieder werden solche Fake-Studien veröffentlicht - auch weil die Prüfmechanismen an ihre Grenzen stoßen. Doch es...

ardaudiothek.de

Even the authors requested this article to be retracted in 2020, but didn't get a response from the journal. Yikes, Elsevier....

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · 6mo ago

(1/x) This paper was retracted recently: Liu et al. 2018 (DOI: 10.1016/j.biopha.2018.02.006). I flagged issues in June '25, and it took ~8 months to get this clearly made up article retracted. But there is more to this paper. pubpeer.com/publications...

(1/x) This paper was retracted recently: Liu et al. 2018 (DOI: 10.1016/j.biopha.2018.02.006). I flagged issues in June '25, and it took ~8 months to get this clearly made up article retracted. But there is more to this paper. pubpeer.com/publications...

This dumpster fire of a paper straight from Elsevier's papermill hell 'Environmental Research' just got retracted. Took just 8 months to conclude that completely nonsensical citations and insane COI between Editor and Authors warrants some consequenes... pubpeer.com/publications...

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · last yr.

Papermill superstar Muhammad Bilal LOOOVES his own work so no surprise that 50ish% of the references in this review are to his own stuff. But he forgot how to format references properly; very cringe paper: pubpeer.com/publications... Detail on his time in Poland: forbetterscience.com/2024/12/17/n...

Yang et al. 2023 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2022.130308), co-authored by none other than Jörg Rinklebe. pubpeer.com/publications... I am not a statistician but to me the maximum and minimum should not be labeled by the same letter/group, if none of the intermediate values are...

Arguing with authors about how similar two Kiwi's can look: Iqbal et al. 2025 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.148178). These must be images of the same fruit, in my opinion. (the rotation is also not a great sign...). I am a matter expert due to years-long Kiwi consumption! pubpeer.com/publications...

(1/X) I have found ~2 problematic articles / day in 2026 so far Elsevier's 'International Journal of Biological Macromolecules'. The journal is an embarrassment. This comes after hundreds of problematic papers reported to them in 2025. Here is a 'worst-of' 2026 (so far):

(1/3) Ahmad et al. 2021 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2020.124852). This is one of many Rinklebe co-authorship papers with various issues, most notably COI between editor and author. But there is also some rather odd repetitions in the summary tables. No raw data is deposited. pubpeer.com/publications...

Does someone want to guess the senior authors name in this article? Majeed et al. 2024 (DOI: 10.1016/j.csite.2025.106802) pubpeer.com/publications... Check out the reference section for a very subtle hint:

A case from the 'strange' category: This XRD pattern looks like the noise signature was trimmed with a cookie cutter? Abdin et al. 2025 (DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2025.143841) in 'Food Chemistry'. pubpeer.com/publications... Not sure why someone would use this method. Maybe get rid of peaks?

@mumumouse2.bsky.social & I have, at this point, reported almost 500 papers w/ issues to Elsevier's International Journal of Biological Macromolecules. Barely any have been addressed. Nothing has changed since: Shanmugam et al. 2026 (10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149319) pubpeer.com/publications...

Paper retracted this week because the reviewer (presumably Rabiul Awual, who's shenanigans I have been looking into for a while now) requested at least 8 of his (unrelated) papers to be cited. Authors didn't question and complied. Also unauthorized authorship changes... pubpeer.com/publications...

I have written a blog at ForBetterScience. Scientific Reports appears to be as bad as ever despite promises to change and an "excellent team" forbetterscience.com/2026/01/06/s...

The first retraction for 2026: Advances in Traditional Medicine has a loooot more to investigate, but this is good start. Only a few dozen more to go!

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · 2y ago

I flagged dozens of papers in 'Advances in Traditional Medicine', yet they still publish sketchy stuff like this: Peter et al. 2024 (DOI: 10.1007/s13596-024-00800-y). No #ResearchIntegrity in that journal. #ImageForensics Highest % problematic papers out of all journals I ever looked at. Figure4:

Before embracing the plethora of papermill products coming to us in 2026, let's enjoy the retraction of this masterpiece on the last day of 2025:

Fabian Wittmers@academic-integrity.bsky.social · 2y ago

A great example of sustainable science. Using images generated once to represent two entirely different experiments. Check out my thread on Jabbar et al. 2023 (10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19418) in 'Heliyon' on PubPeer for more issues in this paper: pubpeer.com/publications...

How much photoshop can you fit into a single paper? Azizli et al. 2020 (DOI: 10.1007/s10904-020-01502-z): HOLD ME BEER: pubpeer.com/publications...