Forensic Scientometrics

An emerging field dedicated to protecting the integrity of science.

FoSci Report 2026

McIntosh, Leslie D., Anna Abalkina, Achal Agrawal, et al. 2026. “Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) Report 2026: Understanding, Detecting, and Documenting Manipulation in the Research Ecosystem.” Version 3. Preprint, Figshare, July 17. 1012969 Bytes. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32178456.v3.

McIntosh et al. (2026)

Core issues

AI-generated “slop” image (Rajesh and Elumalai 2025). Reproduced under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Identified by Michal Wojcik (https://bsky.app/profile/peer-reviewed-slop.bsky.social/post/3mtdqakihpk2f).

Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs)
As these tools grow increasingly powerful, their integration into the research ecosystem has facilitated a troubling delegation of core intellectual responsibilities to…

GRIM consistency testing via ERROR (Estimating the Reliability & Robustness of Research) web application. Screenshot reproduced from the COSIG repository under CC BY-NC-SA license (Ozturk et al. 2026).

Data manipulation
Data manipulation generally refers to cases where a study has been conducted but the reported data has been falsified in some way to make the result more impressive. We will…

Fabricated citations
Fabricated references (references whose claimed titles correspond to no existing publication) can arise from paper mill activity, intentional misconduct, or uncritical use of …

Example screenshot of a hijacked journal: the title and ISSN of the legitimate Cineforum (left) were hijacked by the copycat (right).

Hijacked journals
Hijacked journals represent clone websites of legitimate journals. They copy the title, ISSN, and other metadata of the original journal in order to create an alternative…

Examples of image duplication (Bik et al. 2016). Reproduced unaltered under CC BY 4.0 license

Image manipulation
Inappropriate image duplication and image manipulation is one of the most common research integrity issues detected in published articles. Usually, images that should depict…

Excess publications from open datasets. Reproduced from Spick et al. (2026) under CC BY 4.0 license.

Open data exploitation
The last 3 years have seen an explosion in published manuscripts analyzing open-access health datasets, in many cases presenting misleading or biologically implausible…

Example of a paper mill advertisement. Source: https://abalkina.com/paper-mills/tanu-pro/.

Paper mills
An organisation that sells authorship for fraudulent or low-quality articles and guarantees their placement in journals. Paper mills may also sell citations (McIntosh et al.…

SimTexter output of comparison between similar articles (Elisabeth M Bik, March 2024, https://pubpeer.com/publications/E973017214FF8A834124D94533460A#6).

Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the act of copying someone else’s work, possibly with minor alterations, and passing it off as one’s own work (Ozturk et al. 2026, “Plagiarism of text”).

Barriers to conducting replications in cancer biology (Errington et al. 2021). Reproduced unaltered under CC BY 4.0 license

Reproducibility crisis
Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of…

Review mills
Review mills use reviewers with established credentials who write boilerplate reviews containing generic and vague recommendations that can be tracked across different peer…

Inconsistent reference metadata for the same article in Crossref vs. Dimensions. Reproduced from Besançon et al. (2024) under CC BY 4.0 license.

Sneaked references
A form of citation manipulation in which additional, irrelevant references that do not appear in the PDF/HTML version of record are sneaked into the metadata during the DOI…

Special issue hacking, as seen in Crosetto et al. (2026). Reproduced under CC BY 4.0 license.

Special issues
Special issues serve the historically recent alignment of incentives of open-access publishers with the pre-existing needs of authors under “publish or perish”. Authors…

Example of stealth correction documented by Elisabeth Bik on PubPeer: Figure 5a and a portion of the caption for Figure 5 were removed post publication without notice.

Stealth corrections
A stealth correction is a post-publication change made to a scientific article, without providing a correction note or any other indicator that the publication was…

Problematic Paper Screener statistics as of August 13, 2026. Captured from https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener.

Tortured phrases
Tortured phrases are the result of authors using paraphrasing software (e.g., SpinBot) to copy-paraphrase-paste content from already published articles, in order to produce…
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FoSci blog

Summer Holiday
If you want something to do near this area while many of us northern hemisphere individuals take a break, here are some suggestions:
Forensic Scientometrics
Jul 13, 2026

Digital information aqueduct (Image generated with AI. Photo by Adobe Stock.)

AI Aqueducts: Speed. Confidence. And Contaminants.
AI infrastructure is constantly improving – building better aqueducts for the flow of information. These aqueducts are also streamlining science. But aqueducts do not make…
Leslie McIntosh
Jul 2, 2026

What News and the Web Are Telling Research About Trust
I’m fortunate to work with colleagues who think deeply about knowledge production. Years ago, Leslie McIntosh said something that has stayed with me: “I’m afraid what…
Emily Alagha
May 27, 2026

The FoSci Maturity Model 2026 ‘Maturity’ is based on the breadth of knowledge of the topic, the number of people working on detection, and the availability of methods to detect and prevent activities.

Mapping Manipulation of Research. Because you cannot fix what you cannot see.
Research is vast, from discovering pathways of dementia to interrogating knowledge itself. It operates across an equally complex landscape. Researchers work in laboratories…
Leslie McIntosh
May 14, 2026

Assault on Two Fortresses by Jacques Callot, French early 17th century

Research Integrity IS Research Security
There are two offices at most universities dealing with foreign (and domestic) research interference. One handles research integrity — the rules, values, and practices that…
Leslie McIntosh
Apr 16, 2026

prompt for ChatGPT : “I like to create a serious or conceptual pencil sketch on the two greek goddesses Truth and Trust in ‘action’ of conversing or discussion like style, possibly in the background of a Greek or Roman amphitheatre”

The Goddesses Truth and Trust
We tend to think of research integrity as a modern invention: a child of bureaucracy, born somewhere between the IRB form, data management plan, and the ORCiD profile.…
Juergen Wastl
Mar 31, 2026

Florence Nightingale’s coxcomb designs showing “the causes of mortality in the army in the east.” (Image in Public Domain)

Who Defends Science at Scale? And How?
A recent Chemical & Engineering News article highlighted the growing community of scientific sleuths uncovering problematic research and large-scale fraud in the scholarly…
Forensic Scientometrics, Leslie McIntosh
Mar 19, 2026

A photo of the Namibia desert sand with a rusty, shaded part on the left and a lighter color sloping down on the right.

Access Isn’t Trust
Access to words, thoughts and information are no longer a bottleneck. Access to trusted resources are. In this new era of conversational bibliometrics and AI-mediated…
Leslie McIntosh
Feb 18, 2026

Allegory of Avarice, or Fraud by Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Fudging or Fraud?
The term “publish or perish” in academia describes the insidious dilemma that links professional recognition and awards to the publication of peer-reviewed research papers…
Brendan Walker-Munro
Jan 28, 2026

Image credit: Viktor, Adobe Stock, 1846735508. This image was generated with AI.

The Battle for Knowledge
If the recent past was characterised by an unprecedented influx of data – data that, with the assistance of the internet, was transformed into information – then the present…
Leslie McIntosh
Jan 15, 2026

Rogue Domains: When a University Isn’t a University
Our natural world is full of creatures that mimic other creatures or objects for survival – either to escape predators or to prey on other life. In predatory publishing…
Leslie McIntosh
Dec 11, 2025

Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme.

Self-Citation Patterns Among Researchers
The landscape of academic publishing is complex, with self-citation standing as an intriguing aspect of scholarly communication. While a degree of self-citations is expected…
Mihaela-Alina Coste
Nov 12, 2025

Drawing depicting Pepper’s Ghost illusion as drawn by Bertrand appox. 1865 (image in public domain).

Spoofing an Institution: Pepper’s Ghost
Our societies are made predictable and manageable through institutions. It’s through institutions that a public interest comes to be refracted.
Leslie McIntosh
Oct 30, 2025

Research that has been mentioned outside of the publication (data from Altmetric).

Questionable Research with High-Profile Attention
There’s a fundamental knot we need to untangle in the world of research: the factors that determine career advancement often clash with the pursuit of making reliable…
Federica Silvi
Oct 16, 2025

Pegboard for mapping work at Bletchley Park, UK (photo: Leslie McIntosh)

Intelligence Gathering in an Era of (Research) Conflict
Earlier this month, I had the joy of spending time in the UK with Dr Kandy White, Director of Research Ethics at Macquarie University and active in FoSci. Together we made a…
Leslie McIntosh
Sep 26, 2025

Countries represented in the Pharmakon Neuroscience Research Network. (Image taken by author from dimensions.ai query.)

From Nefarious Networks to Legitimate Funding
At the 10th Peer Review Congress, I presented new findings on the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network in Manufactured Impact: How a Non-existent Research Network Manipulated…
Leslie McIntosh
Sep 4, 2025

Ad hoc air filter created for Apollo 13. (Copyright 2008 NASA)

Beyond Duct Tape: Forensics, Fixes, and the Future of Science
Duct tape famously brought the Apollo 13 astronauts home alive – thanks to the team effort, including Commander Jim Lovell and engineer Ed Smylie. (Rest in peace, both.)
Leslie McIntosh
Aug 13, 2025

Error vs. Deception: Unpacking the ‘Why’ of Retractions (part 2/2)
Over 50% of retractions include flaws in the science itself – errors in data, results, or methods. That part isn’t shocking. Research, by definition, explores the unknown…
Leslie McIntosh
Jul 31, 2025

The image is a multi-colored mind map categorizing types of research integrity concerns into five main areas: Serious Alterations, Author Integrity, Flawed Research, System Level, and Supplemental Information. 'Serious Alterations' includes duplication by the author, falsification or fabrication of data, manipulation, and plagiarism. 'Author Integrity' involves issues like identity falsification, ethical violations, lack of approval, integrity problems, and general misconduct. 'Flawed Research' covers errors, contamination, and unreliable research. 'System Level' addresses broader issues in the scientific ecosystem such as legal problems, miscommunication, publisher or institutional failures, publishing manipulation, objections, and third-party involvement. At the bottom, 'Supplemental Information' refers to contextual data including complaints, investigations, retractions or withdrawals, comments, and instances where there is insufficient information.

Error vs. Deception: Unpacking the ‘Why’ of Retractions (part 1/2)
Retractions are a vital part of the self-correcting nature of science, but they often raise more questions than they answer. What went wrong? Was it an honest mistake or…
Leslie McIntosh
Jul 30, 2025

Research, Attention, and Manipulation
Forensic scientometrics isn’t about finding fraudulent papers. It’s about tracing the signals of manipulation and learning how to trust in science is quietly shaped…
Federica Silvi, Leslie McIntosh
Jul 15, 2025

Example of potential image duplication, as flagged for concern on PubPeer.

Doctored Knowledge
Scientific sleuth René Aquarius (and co-author on this blog) has raised many concerns over a year about “problematic images” in almost 100 papers, prompting a recent U.S.…
René Aquarius, Leslie McIntosh
Jun 26, 2025

Evidence of Rosalind Franklin’s work on virus structures that were instrumental in discovering the DNA double helix. (Image from Cambridge University, UK archives)

Knowledge Fidelity
As presented in the June 2025 UKSG newsletter.
Leslie McIntosh
Jun 13, 2025

Many colourful Brazilian Carnival masks

Science Manipulations: Myths and Truths
When people hear about the messier side of science — citation games, vanity journals, unusual networks — they often push back (still). Not necessarily because they don’t…
Leslie McIntosh
May 19, 2025

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

Combatting Truth Decay
Meandering through the International War Memorial in London in late 2023, I wrestled with the unsettling thought that information warfare does not leave science untouched.…
Leslie McIntosh, Will White
Apr 29, 2025

Exquisite meals come from trusted ingredients. Pictured: Lemons of Southern Italy.

Trust is a Manual Override
Harnessing AI to accelerate research won’t work without inspection, introspection, and integrity. AI won’t solve our problems on its own—it might even make things worse by…
Leslie McIntosh
Apr 16, 2025

Photo from Emory Allen found here, reproduced under CC-BY-NC-2.0 license.

We Need to Talk about Research Security
Some researchers might know what research integrity issues are. Experts like Elisabeth Bik and Mu Yang show examples of inappropriate image duplication on social media every…
René Aquarius
Apr 2, 2025

Unlabeled dominoes, falling in sequence.

The Domino Effect of Faulty Metadata
Scientific integrity doesn’t end with peer-reviewed results or reproducible methods. In the age of open infrastructure, metadata plays an increasingly critical role, not…
Ricardo
Mar 26, 2025

Papaya represents the hidden weapons prepared to attack—photo courtesy of Papaya’s housemate, Leslie.

Fraud, Blackmail, and the Weaponization of Integrity
When I explain the research ecosystem—how it functions, where it breaks, and how bad actors exploit it—I often meet a mix of curiosity and disbelief. Most people understand…
Forensic Scientometrics, Leslie McIntosh
Mar 19, 2025

The British Library entrance gate, London, UK (Photo Credit: C. G. P. Grey’s Photography)

Information Warfare and the Library
Sometimes, without realizing it, you find yourself in the middle of a world event. Naturally, you may not know it at the time. It’s hard to place a single event within the…
Forensic Scientometrics, Leslie McIntosh
Mar 3, 2025

Author Check: The IMDb of the Research World
Hardly a movie or TV series goes by without that nagging question: “Where have I seen that face before? Weren’t they in that other movie?” Back in the day, you might have…
Juergen Wastl
Feb 13, 2025

A cat not named Chester (Photo credit: Papaya’s housemate Leslie McIntosh)

What’s in a Name: Fictitious Authors in Science
Real, fictitious, fraudulent? A co-authoring cat? At some point, when developing Trust Markers for scholarly literature, it became clear that knowing whether a paper is…
Leslie McIntosh
Jan 23, 2025

Image of a 7 story classical Parisian building with commerce on the ground level and top two levels appearing as a mansard roof.

A Reflection on 2024
After years immersed in the world of trust in research—wearing many hats as an academic, a collaborator with government agencies, a partner to non-profits, a start-up…
Leslie McIntosh
Jan 8, 2025

Vanity Journals, Conflicts of Interest, and the Quest for Research Integrity
A particular gem of a sentence from a paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy has been making the rounds on social media and PubPeer, prompting lively…
Leslie McIntosh, Forensic Scientometrics
Nov 21, 2024

Colosseum, Rome, Italy

Ancient Lessons for Modern Science
“What truly bound all Romans together…were unspoken rules of social and political conduct. The Romans never had a written constitution or extensive body of written law—they…
Leslie McIntosh
Oct 29, 2024

The emerging field of Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci)
Several major news stories have covered journal editors being bribed, university presidents resigning for questionable research integrity standards, and undisclosed…
Leslie McIntosh
Oct 14, 2024
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References

McIntosh, Leslie D., Anna Abalkina, Achal Agrawal, et al. 2026. “Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) Report 2026: Understanding, Detecting, and Documenting Manipulation in the Research Ecosystem.” Version 3. Preprint, Figshare, July 17. 1012969 Bytes. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32178456.v3.

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