The Peer-to-Processor Review

The Pirelli case — a sleuth who identified citation manipulation in ACM computer science proceedings, was sued for defamation, and ultimately vindicated — is a significant research integrity and whistleblower protection story.

A Lancet letter reporting a 12-fold increase in fabricated citations in PubMed-indexed papers over just two years, with 1-in-277 papers in early 2026 showing fabricated references.

Dense roundup hitting multiple critical AI-in-publishing threads simultaneously: paper mills exploiting IEEE proceedings at scale (1,700 offers), AI disclosure policies not working across 5 million papers, a South Africa AI policy withdrawn due to AI-generated fake sources, and a Harvard physicis...

High-impact retraction from one of the world's most prestigious medical journals.

Empirical counterpoint to a growing fear in research methodology: AI bots gaming survey data.

Retraction Watch's weekend roundup surfaces the BuyTheBy dataset—a new resource tracking paper mill authorship pricing ($56–$5,600 per slot)—alongside the UK Biobank data breach and reader links on AI as a research tool and AI agents gaining social network capabilities.

A predatory journal fabricated papers and listed high-profile researchers — including Eric Topol — as authors without consent.

The BuyTheBy dataset offers the first systematic look at the economics of fake authorship — a shadow market where AI-generated papers increasingly serve as the product being sold.

Retraction Watch managing editor Kate Travis testified before the U.S.

A roundup covering LLMs and research integrity, the failure of cash incentives for peer review, and a deep dive into the vaping literature's reproducibility problems.

A Retraction Watch roundup anchored by emerging debate on whether LLMs are intrinsically problematic for scholarly integrity or merely a symptom of deeper system failures.

The mention of AI-generated fake article networks elevates this beyond a standard retraction roundup.