FoSci Blog

Summer Holiday

We’re taking some time off. A few musings worth visiting before we return in September.

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

AI Aqueducts: Speed. Confidence. And Contaminants.

The AI Pipeline Has No Way to Judge the Science It Uses

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

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…

Mapping Manipulation of Research. Because you cannot fix what you cannot see.

The Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) Report – giving publishers, institutions, funders, and policymakers a framework to strengthen research integrity and rebuild trust in science.

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

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

The Goddesses Truth and Trust

The Ancient Myths Behind Research Integrity

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.…

Who Defends Science at Scale? And How?

Scientific Intelligence Needs Infrastructure

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

Access Isn’t Trust

AI aggregation without accountability corrupts knowledge

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

Fudging or Fraud?

Where Research Misconduct Becomes a Crime

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

The Battle for Knowledge

Knowledge is precious and vulnerable

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

Rogue Domains: When a University Isn’t a University

An inquiry into typo-squatting, invisible trust markers, and the fragility of the research ecosystem.

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

Self-Citation Patterns Among Researchers

What’s normal? What’s unusual?

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

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

Questionable Research with High-Profile Attention

A Case for Funders’ Due Diligence in Research

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…

Intelligence Gathering in an Era of (Research) Conflict

The FoSci Files

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

From Nefarious Networks to Legitimate Funding

From bogus affiliations to taxpayer money

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

Beyond Duct Tape: Forensics, Fixes, and the Future of Science

A look back on (almost) a year of FoSci

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

Error vs. Deception: Unpacking the ‘Why’ of Retractions (part 2/2)

A look into the applications of the retraction reasons taxonomy 2.0.

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

Error vs. Deception: Unpacking the ‘Why’ of Retractions (part 1/2)

A description, an example, and a tool to use (freely available) to classify retractions.

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

Research, Attention, and Manipulation

Questionable articles can quietly move into Wikipedia and news outlets without notice.

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

Doctored Knowledge

Doctored Images, Corrupted Knowledge: How manipulated images in scientific papers can feed AI and amplify harm

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

Knowledge Fidelity

The Art and Science of Trust

As presented in the June 2025 UKSG newsletter.

Leslie McIntosh

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

Combatting Truth Decay

A Taxonomy of Scholarly Disinformation

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

Trust is a Manual Override

AI doesn’t taste the outcome of what it produces. Humans do.

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

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…

The Domino Effect of Faulty Metadata

Why Open Source Analysis Demands Metadata Vigilance

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…

Fraud, Blackmail, and the Weaponization of Integrity

When Guardians of Science Face Retaliation

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

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

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…

What’s in a Name: Fictitious Authors in Science

Whose name is on the scholarly paper matters

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

A Reflection on 2024

The first year of Forensic Scientometrics

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

Vanity Journals, Conflicts of Interest, and the Quest for Research Integrity

November 2024 has been another intriguing month for the forensic scientometrics community

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

Ancient Lessons for Modern Science

What Roman Mos Maiorum Teaches Us About Protecting 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

The emerging field of Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci)

An introduction

Several major news stories have covered journal editors being bribed, university presidents resigning for questionable research integrity standards, and undisclosed…

Leslie McIntosh

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