Er-Te Zheng
@ertezheng.bsky.social
PhD researcher at University of Sheffield | Computational Social Science, Science of Science, Scientometrics, Social Media Metrics, Research Integrity
🧵 (Part 1) Science is Not Just for Scientists In a few short years we have seen the rise of scammers, quacks, unlettered politicians assuming critical health infrastructure roles (with predictably devastating results) and more. Should "Science" just be for scientists? 1/25
A growing number of private firms are offering researchers artificial-intelligence tools for scrutinizing manuscripts before publication go.nature.com/4wSqQgQ
This AI tool claims to pick the top 1% of preprints. Should researchers trust it?
QED Science says that its metrics reduce bias by assessing papers solely on the basis of their originality and validity.
go.nature.com
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2026) considers "unanticipated ignorance" in science. "It is an ignorance that we did not know about, one that we were not able to guess unless experimentation confronted us with it." doi.org/10.1007/978-...
Scientists who use large language models (LLMs) to help them with their research will spend less time refining their work and instead jump quickly to fresh projects, according to a modelling study. go.nature.com/451DgXl
Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts
Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.
go.nature.com
Just had an idea to study how AI affects the size of scientific teams, only to find that so many papers have already explored it 🤣 Academia is getting way too competitive 😅 arxiv.org/abs/2607.10780 arxiv.org/abs/2605.27404 arxiv.org/abs/2603.01718
Return of the solo author: The changing division of labor in science in the age of generative AI
Modern science has experienced a long shift from individual work to team production. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) might appear to extend this trajectory by lowering research costs and enabl...
arxiv.org
cnsplots: Publication-Ready Scientific Plots for Cell, Nature, and Science Journals github.com/faridrashidi... really cool work here from a postdoc at NIH.
GitHub - faridrashidi/cnsplots: 🎨 Toolkit for generating publication-quality plots for Cell, Nature and Science journals
🎨 Toolkit for generating publication-quality plots for Cell, Nature and Science journals - faridrashidi/cnsplots
github.com
🎉 Digital Science congratulates all participants in the NIH S-index Challenge! Our CEO, Dr Daniel Hook, says it has been “an honour and a privilege” to participate as a member of one of the top teams in the Challenge. The team developed a new metric for measuring the impact of data sharing.
💥 Open Science Festival 2027 Bamberg call for abstracts is out! This is a great event, we will very likely be there.
Open Science Festival@osfestivalde.bsky.social · 2mo agoDer Call for Proposals für das Open Science Festival 2027 in Bamberg ist geöffnet! Gesucht werden Lightning Talks, Workshops, Poster, Projekt-Showcases und Beiträge für den Toolmarktplatz. www.uni-bamberg.de/osfestival20... #OSfestival2027 #openscience
On US-China research collaboration: The number of papers funded by NSF/NIH/DOE that have China+US co-authors has dropped about 40% since peak in 2020. From @dangaristo.bsky.social analysis in @nature.com of US political push to further restrict collabs with China. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
"The journal is a seventeenth-century technology asked to do four modern jobs at once: disseminate results, certify their quality, allocate scholarly attention, and confer career credit. It does none of them well." arxiv.org/abs/2607.05454
Publishing Without Journals: An Open, Forkable Archive with Attributed Review
The journal is a seventeenth-century technology asked to do four modern jobs at once: disseminate results, certify their quality, allocate scholarly attention, and confer career credit. It does none o...
arxiv.org
General purpose AI tools for science, such as Claude Science, promise to accelerate research. But which is right for you? go.nature.com/4h5EBnc
Which ‘AI scientist’ suits your lab? A guide for the perplexed
General purpose AI tools for science, such as Claude Science, promise to accelerate research. But which is right for you?
go.nature.com
An estimated US$228 billion in biomedical research funding may be wasted every year.JMIR Metascience and Research Integrity is now accepting submissions for its first call for papers in its new section on Waste in Research. Submit your research today: https://metascience.jmir.org/announcements/682
"The role of altmetrics in citation emergence: a temporal approach" is our new preprint available in @socarxiv.bsky.social. Tracking the appearance of altmetric through the time, we have found that social media trigger the appearance of citations and shorten the time it takes for them to occur.
With AI tools like Claude Science, data-rich fields may soon see a huge surface-level boom. If the data are easy to access, AI can now clean, model, visualize, and write up analyses very fast. This may make database-driven quantitative papers much cheaper and easier to produce at scale.
Tune in on the 23rd July, where we talk about the role of sentiment analysis in research evaluation. @culturebullet.com is co-panelist with Charlie Rapple of @growkudos.bsky.social and @thatandream.com.
Council of Science Editors@councilscienceed.bsky.social · 3mo ago📈 Alternative Metrics in Scholarly Publishing: Signals, Strategy, and Responsible Use 📅 July 23, 2026 | 11:00 am- 12:00pm ET ✨ Registration and More Information: cse.memberclicks.net/altmed#/
Should children follow their parents' research paths? Intergenerational research continuity and divergence in academic families https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29488 How academic advantages are transmitted within families is usually studied as occupational inheritance, but it is not clear whether ...📈🤖
I getting a pre-submission peer review on a manuscript is a great use for AI. You don't need a third-party tool. GPT-5.x and Opus 4.x are good, and open/community development of these skills/harnesses is the way. I wrote a Claude skill wrapping the Consensus MCP to do this. doi.org/10.59350/b35...
Deadline Extended: METSTI 2026 The submission deadline for the ASIS&T METSTI Annual Symposium on Informetric, Scientometric, Scientific and Technical Information Research has been extended to June 25, 2026. We welcome your submissions and look forward to seeing you in Bangkok, Nov 6–10, 2026！
Even in Denmark, with its excellent provisions for children, parenthood marks a sharp divergence in academic careers (from employment to tenure to publications) for men and women -- for a variety of reasons reflecting both structure and agency. opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/f...
‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. By Xiaoying You www.nature.com/articles/d41...
‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics
Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.
nature.com
· #AcademicSky · #ResearchIntegrity · #ScientificMisconduct · “Problems [Geng Hongwei] has identified in nine papers published in Springer Nature journals have triggered numerous official investigations and the dismissal of several high-ranking academics.”
Misconduct sleuth in China swiftly gains acclaim for calling out questionable papers
Independent vlogger Geng Hongwei galvanizes often-sluggish institutions to investigate and punish prominent scientists
science.org
2026. AI-assisted teams outperform AI-led teams but not human-only teams in assessing research reproducibility in quantitative social science www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
AI-assisted teams outperform AI-led teams but not human-only teams in assessing research reproducibility in quantitative social science | PNAS
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are transforming how scientists conduct and validate research, offering promise as tools to improve sc...
pnas.org
Prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have soared in popularity over the past few months. But how do their prediction powers compare with the opinions of subject-matter experts? go.nature.com/4fi6fg1
Can Polymarket predict the progress of science, or are subject-experts better?
Online prediction markets are taking bets on everything from climate change to quantum computing. But researchers question their accuracy.
go.nature.com
New @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint led by @pranujanp.bsky.social, studying errors such as incorrect primer sequences and contaminated #CellLines in #circRNA papers in high impact factor journals. We found reagent errors in 51% of n=118 circRNA papers in high IF journals in 2022 (1/4)🧪
biorxiv.org
Register now to join "The science sleuths: Decoding the findings of the FoSci 2026 Report." #ResearchIntegrity Expert insights into data-driven methods in uncovering research misconduct and manipulation. 🗓️ Thursday 11 June, 3pm BST 10am EDT 🔗 Reserve your spot: https://ow.ly/Y0xn50Z55AW
Third Editor Fired in Elsevier's Citation Cartel Crackdown; Hundreds of Papers At Risk of Retraction • "This is not a series of coincidences; it is a blatant, industrial-scale quid pro quo."
Third Editor Fired in Elsevier's Citation Cartel Crackdown; Hundreds of Papers At Risk of Retraction
"This is not a series of coincidences; it is a blatant, industrial-scale quid pro quo."
chrisbrunet.com
In which the Retraction Watch Database makes it into the Harper's Index. harpers.org/harpers-inde...
New on ScienceIntegrityDigest: My report from the 2026 World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver. If you could not make it, there are links to all my BlueSky live posts from the sessions I attended. #WCRI2026 Read the report here: scienceintegritydigest.com/2026/05/20/r...
Reporting from the 2026 World Conference on Research Integrity
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…
scienceintegritydigest.com
