Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

Correction of scientific literature: Too little, too late!

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the limitations of the current scientific publication system, in which serious post-publication concerns are often addressed too slowly to be effective. In this Perspective, we offer suggestions to improve academia’s willingness and ability to correct errors in an appropriate time frame.

Just 2% of Immigration Court Filings Based on Alleged Criminal Activity in February 2026

Numbers are also lower now than they were a year earlier when President Trump returned to office. One year ago in February 2025, DHS filed NTAs on 821 individuals based on claims of criminal activity compared with 741 today. This represented 4 percent of the cases filed a year ago, rather than just 2 percent now.

Q&A from the slop trenches – GeoSpatial ML

We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.

Scientific production in the era of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping scientific research. We analyze these changes in multiple, large-scale datasets with 2.1M preprints, 28K peer review reports, and 246M online accesses to scientific documents. We find: 1) scientists adopting LLMs to draft manuscripts demonstrate a large increase in paper production, ranging from 23.7-89.3% depending on scientific field and author background, 2) LLM use has reversed the relationship between writing complexity and paper quality, leading to an influx of manuscripts that are linguistically complex but substantively underwhelming, and 3) LLM adopters access and cite more diverse prior work, including books and younger, less-cited documents. These findings highlight a stunning shift in scientific production that will likely require a change in how journals, funding agencies, and tenure committees evaluate scientific works.

Incorrect Citation Association for Articles in Online-Only Springer Nature Journals

We show that citation metrics of journal articles in many of the online-only Springer Nature journals and associated ones are distorted, going back to articles from 2001. We find that most likely due to an API response error, there are many incorrect references which typically lead to Article Number 1 of a given Volume. Among others, the issue affects journals such as Scientific Reports, Nature Communications, Communications journals, Cell Death & Disease, Light: Science & Applications, as well as many BMC, Discovery and npj journals. Beyond the negative effect of introducing incorrect reference information, this distorts the citation statistics of articles in these journals, with a few articles being massively over-cited compared to their peers, while many lose citations; e.g. both in Scientific Reports and in Nature Communications, 5 of the 10 top cited articles have article numbers of 1. We validate the distorted statistics by assessing data from multiple scientific literature databases: Crossref, OpenCitations, Semantic Scholar, and the journals' websites. The issue primarily arises from the inconsistent transition from page-based referencing of articles to article number-based referencing, as well as the improper handling of the change in the publisher's article metadata API. It seems that the most pressing problem has been present since approximately 2011, which we estimate affects the citation count of millions of authors.

California accounts for 1 in 4 ICE arrests of Asian immigrants, new tracker finds

The tracker from Stop AAPI Hate saw a surge in arrests and deportations in the arrest of people from Asian countries.

California accounts for 1 in 4 ICE arrests of Asian immigrants, new tracker finds

The tracker from Stop AAPI Hate saw a surge in arrests and deportations in the arrest of people from Asian countries.

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

Some Data Indicating That Editors and Reviewers Do Not Check Preregistrations During the Review Process · Volume 6 Issue 1

Incorrect Article Type Labeling: This article was previously mislabeled as an editorial article. This has now been corrected.

More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown — ProPublica

The government doesn’t track how often immigration officers detain U.S. citizens. So ProPublica did. We’ve found more than 500 Americans who were held against their will during this Trump administration.

White House Health Report Included Fake Citations (Published 2025)

A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.