The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science

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March 23, 2021 2:39pm EDT

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Tuesday 23 March 2021

Hello Nature readers,
Today we examine the ‘paper mill’ problem, learn about the world’s oldest wooden sculpture and discover flexible circuits inspired by human skin.

Cartoon of researchers looking at a stack of papers with Western Blots. A magnifying glass shows the blots are tadpoles.

(Illustration by Ana Kova)

The fight against fake-paper factories

Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers that have been publicly linked to ‘paper mills’, an analysis by Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected. Physicians in China are a particular target customer for paper mills — companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order — because of intense pressure to publish combined with long work hours. Much of this housecleaning has come about thanks to sleuths who have publicly flagged papers that share suspiciously similar features, such as western blots with identical-looking backgrounds. The effect of such trickery can be very serious, says molecular oncology researcher Jennifer Byrne, who points to suspected fake studies that link genes to particular cancers. “People die from cancer — it is not a game.”

Nature | 14 min read
Read more: Meet Elisabeth Bik, a super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers (Nature | 15 min read)

FRAUD ALLEGATIONS: barchart showing the number of published papers potentially linked to companies that produce fraudulent work.

Oldest wooden relic reshapes history

The world’s oldest wooden sculpture is even older than previously thought. A new study suggests that the 2.7-metre-tall Shigir Idol was carved more than 12,000 years ago from a tree that was already more than 150 years old. The relic was preserved in a peat bog in the Ural Mountains and is the world’s only surviving Stone Age wood carving. Its complex iconography of geometric patterns and human faces suggests that the region’s ancient societies were more sophisticated than previously thought. “The new Shigir evidence makes archaeologists daydream of how the archaeological record may have looked if wooden remains had been preserved in greater abundance,” says archeologist Olaf Jöris.

New York Times | 8 min read
Reference: Quaternary International paper

Beauty decays into hints of new physics

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have seen early hints of an undiscovered particle or interaction. More research is needed, but the results suggest an imbalance in how subatomic beauty quarks decay into two flavours of leptons: electrons and muons. If confirmed, that’s a violation of lepton flavour universality as described by the standard model of particle physics. “It's too early to say if this genuinely is a deviation from the standard model, but the potential implications are such that these results are the most exciting thing I've done in 20 years in the field,” says physicist Mitesh Patel. “We were actually shaking when we first looked at the results.”

BBC | 5 min read
Reference: LHC seminar

COVID-19 coronavirus update

Feature

The ethics of pausing a vaccine

When Germany suspended its roll-out of the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine, it left unvaccinated people at risk of getting COVID-19. The move was taken despite a lack of evidence, highlighting a tricky ethical dilemma that swirls around the Hippocratic oath, ‘First, do no harm.’ “When the alternative to doing a small amount of harm is allowing a vast amount of harm, then the ‘do no harm’ slogan is a poor guide to policy,” argues ethicist Jeff McMahan.

The New York Times | 8 min read

Notable quotable

“Vaccine passports that enable citizens of some nations to travel internationally while millions of others wait for vaccinations will serve only to deepen global inequities.”

Vaccine passports risk relying on a fragmented system that could have the adverse effect of extending the pandemic., argues infectious-disease epidemiologist Saskia Popescu and global-health lawyer Alexandra Phelan. (The New York Times | 5 min read)

Features & opinion

Coloured scanning electron micrograph of an electronic circuit printed onto skin

Microscope image of a flexible circuit printed onto skin, which works even when stretched. (John Rogers, Univ. Illinois/SPL)

Flexible circuits inspired by human skin

Wearable, skin-inspired electronics have already made it into volunteers and clinics globally. For example, when used for health monitoring, they can spot early signs of COVID-19 in front-line health workers in Chicago. Other ‘e-skins’ are giving robots a lighter, human-like touch. But whether they are for people or robots, such devices represent a significant chemical and engineering challenge: electronic components are typically brittle and inflexible, and human skin is a malleable but difficult canvas.

Nature | 11 min read

Responsible publishing about suicide

Researchers investigating the mental-health impacts of the pandemic should be aware of how to responsibly report research related to suicide, argue four authors writing on behalf of the International COVID-19 Suicide Prevention Research Collaboration. They outline six key points to consider and highlight useful resources.

Scholarly Kitchen blog | 7 min read

Image of the week

A team member prepares to launch the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD) deep underwater neutrino telescope built on Lake Baikal.

Scientists have submerged a neutrino detector in the crystal-clear waters of the largest freshwater lake in the world, Russia’s Lake Baikal. The Baikal-Gigaton Volume Detector floats around a kilometre beneath the surface. It is made up of clusters of spherical glass and stainless-steel modules, which hang down like strings of beads under the water. The detector will search for high-energy neutrinos emitted by distant cosmic events. (Smithsonian Magazine | 4 min read) (Alexei Kushnirenko/TASS/Getty)

On Friday, our far-flung friend Leif Penguinson basked in the azure waters of Five Flower Lake in Jiuzhaigou National Park, China. (So far flung, in fact, that I didn’t manage to find Leif until today, sorry about that!) Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.

This newsletter is always evolving — tell us what you think! Please send your feedback to [email protected].

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing
With contributions by Ariana Remmel