Incorrect Article Type Labeling: This article was previously mislabeled as an editorial article. This has now been corrected.
Public Editor
Public Editor is a human-trained AI that labels specific reasoning mistakes in the daily news, so we all learn to avoid biased thinking.
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.
Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study | Manoj Lalu
This is disappointing, but I’m not surprised. I was one of the reviewers for the initial version. You can see by my review (it’s all open) that I flagged primary outcome switching, a complete lack of any data on the cells themselves, and sample size inconsistencies in the protocol versus the report (and within the report). The data seemed impressive. Too good to be true I guess? I never saw the paper again in peer review after that initial review. The next notification I received was that the paper was accepted. Given BMJ’s commitment to open peer review and post-publication scrutiny (which I admire), I have no doubt we will hear about a formal editorial investigation soon.
Doctors’ AI scribes get names of drugs and diagnoses wrong, NHS watchdog warns
Exclusive: Patients identify errors in consultation transcripts that are missed by GPs, Healthwatch England finds
Your doctor’s AI notetaker may be making things up, Ontario audit finds
Made-up therapy referrals, incorrect prescriptions among the common mistakes.
The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review
Writer and author Alex Preston said he “made a serious mistake” after a reader spotted similarities between his review and one that appeared in the Guardian
Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.
A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’
As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors na…
Meta is incorrectly marking real photos as ‘Made by AI’
The problem seems to affect photos made with editing tools.
AI reviewers are here — we are not ready
Nature - Artificial intelligence promises rapid and polite feedback on papers — but we must first review the reviewer.
The review mills, not just (self-)plagiarism in review reports, but a step further
Review mills sum up a new category of reviewer misconduct that flies in the face of reviewer ethics and integrity. A pattern of generic, vague, and repeated affirmations (identical or very similar boilerplate phrasing) is noted in the analysis of 263 review reports, regardless of the scientific content of the papers under review, coupled with coercive citation (perhaps among the main reasons for such behavior), which when combined produce fake reviews. The misconduct associated with review mills is unlike mere plagiarism (self-plagiarism) of reviewer comments. It is important to quantify the problem and to take urgent measures: (a) to identify the review millers; (b) to rectify the published literature; and (c) to determine procedures for journals and publishers on procedures to counter this new type of misconduct.
When should a paper be corrected? Last December, @elisabethbik.bsky.social and other sleuths began flagging papers by a prominent bioengineer, Ali Khademhosseini. They found over 80 with image issues. Khademhosseini and his colleagues have issued over 40 corrections, but avoided retractions.
Science sleuths raise concerns about scores of bioengineering papers
www.nature.comInteresting editing error in today's Pew report. They used CPS to count immigrants (weren't we just arguing about this?) and conclude the number dropped 1.4 million from January to June. They repeat this key sentence, once with and once without the caveat... pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-fi…
