The “Workshop on Fake Science” will take place on Monday, July 7, 2025, at 3:00 PM, at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Grodzka 52, Room 25, and will also be accessible via the MS Teams platform. The presentation will be delivered mostly by “scientific detectives”, whose work is featured in a recent article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00212-1.

Workshop schedule

• Tomasz Żuradzki, Leszek Wroński: How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list
• We investigated how three obscure journals—published by Addleton Academic Publishers—managed to rank among the top 10 philosophy journals in Elsevier’s Scopus database. Through extensive self-citation, template-based articles filled with buzzwords, and fabricated affiliations and grants, these journals manipulated citation metrics like CiteScore and SJR. Following our publication on Retraction Watch, Scopus removed the journals from its index, citing “publication concerns.” The case highlights the vulnerability of automated ranking systems and the risks of relying on them uncritically in academic decision-making.

• Guillaume Cabanac: Pro bono decontamination of the scientific literature: How sleuths track errors and fraud with the Problematic Paper Screener
• Imagine reading invulnerable framework, glucose bigotry, and nucleic corrosive* in a scientific paper published in an established journal with Impact Factor from an haute couture publisher such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer... Well, we identified more than 20k such problematic papers featuring ‘tortured phrases’ produced by paraphrasing tools to deceive plagiarism detection. In 2021, this issue affected 3 every 10k papers. Scammers produce such unreliable papers in bulk to appear hyper productive; they organise citation rings to increase their h-index.
  This talk presents how sleuths strive to decontaminate the literature from this digital pollution. A handful of professional scientists and hobbyists re-assess the suspect papers flagged by the ‘Problematic Paper Screener,’ a public website that screens the 130 million articles published to-date. Its users contributed pro bono post-publication peer reviews on PubPeer and eventually managed to get publishers retract 3000+ papers, mostly in engineering and biomedicine. We also discuss the domino effect of retractions and the necessity to issue chain retractions to stop errors from propagating in the literature.
  
  *instead of immune system, glucose intolerance, and nucleic acid.
   
• Elisabeth Bik: Duplicated Images in Biomedical Research
• Science builds upon science. Even after peer-review and publication, science papers could still contain images or other data of concern. If not addressed post-publication, papers containing incorrect or even falsified data could lead to wasted time and money spent by other researchers trying to reproduce those results. Elisabeth Bik is an image forensics detective who left her paid job in industry to search for and report biomedical articles that contain errors or data of concern. She has done a systematic scan of 20,000 papers in 40 journals and found that about 4% of these contained inappropriately duplicated images. In her talk, she will present several types of inappropriately duplicated images and address the growing problems of 'paper mills', for-profit networks that produce and sell large amounts of low-quality or fake papers, often with the use of artificial intelligence.

• René Aquarius: When science fails to correct itself
• We conducted a systematic review to investigate whether any interventions were tested in animal models of subarachnoid hemorrhage to reduce the effects of early brain injury. We found over 600 scientific articles that should be included in the analysis. However, many of those articles contained grave errors and even signs to intentionally deceive. This presentation will highlight all the findings and describe the hurdles we had to take to finish the project.

• Lonni Besançon: A pandemic of questionable research and publishing practices
• In this talk, I will reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed, and perhaps intensified, a crisis in scientific publishing. I focus on questionable papers that were rapidly accepted through rushed or absent peer review, often facilitated by editorial conflicts of interest. One striking example is the case of the IHU-Marseille, whose publications, despite serious methodological flaws and now proved lack of ethical approvals, shaped medical decisions and public policy. As I show through personal investigations, challenging these papers comes with real risks (from legal threats to coordinated harassment campaigns) and very little help from the main publishing actors. 

• David Bimler: An observational study of “citation payola"

• As bibliometrics and citation indices became a standard part of the academic promotion process, options for improving one's citation count emerged and enriched the scientific ecosystem. One of these options, I propose, is a niche of 'citation brokers', arranging transactions between authors who want their papers to be cited, and other authors in a position to include spurious citation in their unpublished manuscripts. As illustration, I present a pair of complementary tables, A and B, crossing multiple fields of scholarship. Papers were added to Table A if they cited numerous entries of B without the excuse of relevance, and conversely they were added to B if they received citations from multiple entries of A. That is, the tables list citation providers and recipients (consumers) respectively. I argue that these relationships are transactions, and that the existence of a brokerage system is a parsimonious explanation for the situation.

BIO

• Guillaume Cabanac is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toulouse, France. He holds a research chair at the Institut Universitaire de France titled “Decontamination of the scientific literature.” Cabanac develops the Problematic Paper Screener that contributes to the identification, reporting, and retraction of algorithmically generated and fraudulent papers. He is an investigator on the ERC Synergy grant NanoBubbles that questions how, when, and why science fails to correct itself. Cabanac’s research was profiled in the Nature’s 10: he was nicknamed ‘Deception sleuth’ in the journal’s annual list of ‘ten people who helped shape science in 2021.’

• Elisabeth Bik, PhD is a Dutch-American microbiologist who has worked for 15 years at Stanford University and 2 years in industry. Since 2019, she is a science integrity volunteer and consultant who scans the biomedical literature for duplicated or manipulated images and other data of concern. She has found problems in over 9,000 scientific papers, and her work resulted in over 1,400 retractions and another 1,100 corrections. For her work in science communication and exposing research misconduct, she received the 2021 John Maddox Prize and the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award.

• Rene Aquarius is a researcher at the neurosurgery department at the Radboud university medical center. He studied biomedical sciences, got his PhD in orthopedics and is a science sleuth for 2 years now.  

• Lonni Besançon is an Assistant Professor of Visualization at Linköping University, Sweden, a 2023 fellow and local lead for ASAPBio, a Scientific Node Coordinator for the Swedish National Visualization Infrastrure InfraVis, and the editor in chief of the Journal of Visualization and Interaction (JoVI). He obtained his Ph.D from Université Paris Saclay under the supervision of Tobias Isenberg from Inria and Mehdi Ammi from LIMSI/CNRS. He specializes in two primary research areas: developing and studying new interaction techniques for volumetric data visualization, and employing innovative visualizations to enhance statistical data interpretation. He is also dedicated to methodological improvements in research, particularly in detecting and mitigating questionable research practices and enhancing the transparency, robustness, and reusability of research results and materials. Notably, his sleuthing efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic have garnered international recognition, with scientific outlets such as Science acknowledging his contributions. He is best known for his advocacy for better research practices and his sleuthing work which earned him distinctive titles such as "troublemaker for truth" (ABC) and "dogged critic" (Science). In outreach efforts, he tries to make other researchers embrace post publication peer review and academic sleuthing.

• David Bimler is a retired perceptual psychologist from Massey University (New Zealand).

• Tomasz Żuradzki is the Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics and a Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University in Kraków.