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 Unfortunately, this was too ridiculous even for 'Scientific Reports' and the study was retracted this week: pubpeer.com/publications...
'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This nonsense finally was retracted today: Even the title is an absolute mess in my eye, but the photoshop art (disguised as histology images) is what was the nail in the coffin.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...
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...
I do think they actually took my concern seriously and did a pretty good follow-up investigation!
I think this is a journal that has a dedicated EiC that has cleaned up a lot in the last 1-2 years? I might be mixing them up though.
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)
Even the authors requested this article to be retracted in 2020, but didn't get a response from the journal. Yikes, Elsevier....
(5/5) There is still more papers from this papermill out there, but Wiley and Elsevier have recently retracted some of the leftovers that they somehow forgot to address in 2020.
(4/x) I find this worrying, because to me it suggests that the publisher did as little as possible to get to the root of this papermill. They retracted some papers, just enough not to get themselves into trouble, but showed no interest in actually cleaning up the scientific record.
(3/x) Elsevier had addressed a portion of the problematic papers, but 'missed' many that remained on the record for an additional 5 years. Had the publisher tried, they would have easily been able to identify them all, given Smut did almost all of their work for them already.
(2/x) This paper was one of dozens that @smutclyde.bsky.social flagged in 2020 when he uncovered a prolific papermill used primarily (but not only) by Chinese authors. I flagged additional issues in 2025, but this, and many papers of the same template were known to be problematic.
(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...
There is also extensive evidence for severe conflict of evidence between the authors, especially Jörk Rinklebe, and the editor of this paper. This is one of dozens of cases involving Rinklebe and his collaborators...
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...
(10/10) The International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, if it keeps going at this pace is on track to publish more than 700 articles with data/image integrity issues in 2026 alone. That is 1 journal in 1 year. The scientific community is facing a wave of BS we are not prepared for.
(9/X) The journal assured us last year they had made a lot of improvements to their manuscript assessment system to increase their detection of these image/data integrity issues. If this is what the improved system looks like then I don't want to know what it looked like before - did it even exist?
(8/X): We can't forget about manipulated XRD data. A staple in every Elsevier journal that publishes materials-science related data:
Zehra et al. 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149441) pubpeer.com/publications...
(7/X): There is also a huge amount of papers with less extensive but highly problematic issues. For example: Mohandesnezhad et al. 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149584)
Figure 8B has a very obvious overlap, representing different treatments.
(6/X): Lan et al. 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149785) pubpeer.com/publications...
I am sure the authors will claim the duplication was an accidental error during figure assembly, but how does one accidentally rotate a panel??
(5/X): Wang et al. 2026 (10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149529) - a different one than in (4/X) - is an absolute mess. Basically all fluorescence images have overlapping regions for different conditions. Must have been intentional in this case, given the extend of issues. pubpeer.com/publications...
(4/X): Wang et al. 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149607) pubpeer.com/publications...
The duplication in Figure 5 is so blatantly obvious that I am 100% sure that no reviewer or editor has actually looked at this figure for more than a second.
(3/X): Meng et al. 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149484) pubpeer.com/publications...
The noise signature in Figure 6 should be random, but it is largely repetitive between multiple samples. This indicates potential manipulation of the underlying trace...
(2/X): Osman et al. 2026 (10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149633) pubpeer.com/publications...
Even one overlap like this would have me question this experiment. But in Figure 6, most panels appear to overlap, supposedly representing different conditions (clearly not...).
#ImageForensics
(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):
(3/3) I have also contacted the EiC of the 'Journal of Hazardous Materials', but have not received a reply either. I find it ridiculous that the deposition of raw data is not required.
"Data will be made available upon reasonable request" is a ridiculous phrase, it is frankly pathetic.
(2/3) I have contacted the corresponding author 3 weeks ago and again last week to request the underlying raw data for this study to reproduce this table. I have unfortunately been ignored in this effort. (The emails didn't bounce & the study is also not old, so the data should still be available).
(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...
