Singapore is doing well, but underlying this I would wonder if there is a skew towards countries with English as the official language.
This chart shows the top global research universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. So there might be a bias. If you look at the Shanghai ranking, there are a few other non-Anglo universities but not that much more: ShanghaiRanking's Academic Ranking of World Universities Same in other rankings (THE and QS).
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Top centres will attract better researchers and have more choice, but not finding any universities from continental europe in the first list was surprising.
In the end, however, it does not matter from the perspective of science.
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Continental Europe is underfunded. They’re still punching above their weight (or wealth) if you check the top 100 ARWU (Shanghai Ranking).
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Nice to see UofT at #16
Maybe Canada can attract more talent now 
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Chinese university students are paying journals to publish their papers as a quicker way to get into grad school. Even more reason not to trust Chinese papers.
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Besides the issue of research quality and retraction, there is also the issue that the study population could greatly affect the outcomes. In fact, this could explain some of the cases where a research finding in China, say, doesn’t replicate when tested in the U.S. (“heterogeneity”).
For example, people living in some countries supposedly have microbiomes containing more of the types of bacteria that readily convert ellagitannins and ellagic acid to Urolithin A, than do others. If one does a study showing how walnut consumption affects health, maybe when performed in one country with high amounts of those types of bacteria, one sees a strong positive signal; but then when done in another country, one doesn’t. And then it’s tempting to conclude that it must be because the people who ran that first study were committing fraud somewhere along the way.
This also extends to mouse studies for longevity. The differences in the microbiomes of the mice under study in different labs could explain the differences seen when certain supplements are tested.
One could turn this around and use the phenomenon to help find supplements or drugs whose efficacy is strongly impacted by the microbiome – look for studies with extreme heterogeneity, but where the labs performing them are reputable.
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Hundreds of suspicious journals flagged by AI screening tool
System that searches for signs of bad practice could help to weed out questionable titles.
Researchers have identified more than 1,000 potentially problematic open-access journals using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that screened around 15,000 titles for signs of dubious publishing practices.
The approach, described in Science Advances on 27 August1, could be used to help tackle the rise in what the study authors call “questionable open-access journals” — those that charge fees to publish papers without doing rigorous peer review or quality checks.
Predatory publishers’ latest scam: bootlegged and rebranded papers
None of the journals flagged by the tool has previously been on any kind of watchlist, and some titles are owned by large, reputable publishers. Together, the journals have published hundreds of thousands of research papers that have received millions of citations.
The study suggests that “there’s a whole group of problematic journals in plain sight that are functioning as supposedly respected journals that really don’t deserve that qualification”, says Jennifer Byrne, a research-integrity sleuth and cancer researcher at the University of Sydney, Australia.
The tool is available online in a closed beta version, and organizations that index journals, or publishers, can use it to review their portfolios, says study co-author Daniel Acuña, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. But, he adds, the AI sometimes makes mistakes, and is not designed to replace detailed evaluations of journals and individual publications that might result in a title being removed from an index. “A human expert should be part of the vetting process” before any action is taken, he says.
Read the full writeup:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02782-6
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I am a bit depressed about all this. Chinese papers have a high probability of being faked and the gold standard American papers are having research defunded and cut. It’s going to be a while before we start getting significant scientific advancements going forward. Not to mention all the research that was nearing completion and cut.
I hate to say it, but big pharma is probably our best bet for longevity advancement for the next 5-10 years.
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An investigation has identified more than 1,500 research articles produced by a network of Ukrainian companies that could be one of Europe’s largest paper mills — businesses that produce fake or low-quality research papers and sell authorships.
Anna Abalkina, a research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, discovered the paper mill in 20221 after spotting papers with author e-mail addresses that had domains that did not match the geographical locations of academic affiliations. She dubbed the paper mill Tanu.pro after the most frequently used of these unusual domains.
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Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01902-0
"Four senior Chinese academics have been disciplined after a blogger and former PhD student flagged data anomalies in their published papers and went viral in the process.
A blogger known as Student Geng, whose real name is Geng Hongwei, questioned the authenticity of the data in five papers and named five acclaimed researchers at four Chinese universities who co-authored the publications. The papers were published in Nature 1 and three Nature-branded journals2–5. One accused researcher is under investigation at his university — the others have faced steep consequences following their institutions’ inquiries."
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Paper fabrication is not unique to Springer Nature journals; Science also features a significant number of fraudulent papers. The reason these retracted or fraudulent papers seem to originate entirely from Nature is simply because Nature mandates the disclosure of all raw data.
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Professor here, also served as peer reviewer for plenty of journals, and I’m on a few editorial boards, associate editor positions etc. My brief thoughts:
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Problematic papers are everywhere. But yes, Iran, China, Pakistan, India and Turkey are absolutely hotspots for providing some very dodgy work, based on my observations. However, the highest profile ones IMO do still seem to be the USA. I don’t really see much from Europe in general, I think because professors are generally pretty secure in jobs, don’t have as much “publish or perish”, and also don’t really profit that much.
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Peer review is very broken now. From my editorial system, I can see all sorts of stats. There are people with 100s of papers published in the past 5 years, and have done zero peer reviewing within our journal publishing group (and it’s a very big one you’ve already talked about in this thread). So that’s somebody who is not contributing to the system whatsoever. You also have researcher profiles on there with 1-2 publications total, an H-index of like 3, and they’ve reviewed 100+ papers. So these are people totally unqualified, but they’ve overseen hundreds of papers. You can also see acceptance rates; some reviewers literally have 100% acceptance rates. You can see turnaround times; some reviewers have turnaround times of less than 24 hours. And I hope this isn’t perpetuating horrible stereotypes, but Iranian, Chinese, Pakistan, India and Turkey seem the most problematic for this. I wonder if their universities somehow are rewarding people for reviewing, or there’s some other incentive.
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Related to point 2, it is very difficult to find good-quality reviewers. Even at the best journal I am an editor for, we struggle. Currently, our ratio is around 8:1 in terms of invitations to review and people who accept the job. Of those who accept, maybe 70% will return the review on time. And of those 70%, around 70% will be a useful review of decent quality. Increasingly, more people turn in blatantly LLM-written reviews.
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It is weirdly becoming harder, and easier, than ever before to publish papers. My group has a small study, pilot study, kinda preliminary data. Definitely interesting, not very impactful. We tried to publish it, and even specialised journals with low impact factors won’t take it. Even a small off-shoot data-driven journal like Scientific Reports nowadays has a <20% acceptance rate. However, it is increasingly easier to publish with MDPI, Frontiers etc. So basically, I am now putting out pre-prints so I can at least start publicising, discussing and even citing the work.
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It’s almost impossible to publish negative studies now. I have several where we’ve tried to replicate things and haven’t been able to. Nobody will accept them. And the LLM reviewers don’t like this either, because they just cite the previous work you’re disagreeing with and tell you that you’re wrong. So again, pre-prints for those.
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Journal integrity management is shit. I have emailed editors plenty of times telling them about papers with literally impossible methods, and nothing happens. We found one recently trying to follow a protocol where you need a piece of equipment inside a tube. Paper tells you the manufacturer, model etc of all the items. We bought them. The device doesn’t even fit in the tube. So the paper is just totally wrong. Authors didn’t reply. I contacted the Editor. No reply to that either.
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Some journals are wising up, now requiring all raw data to be deposited, sequencing, proteomics, home-written code etc - all deposited publicly. I 100% support this. Of course it won’t stop people literally tampering with data, but it’s definitely a disincentive.
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One idea I am loving is “registered report”. In other words, you do it like a clinical trial, submitting a study plan to a journal. They review the plan, provide feedback etc, and you agree. Then, they provisionally accept the paper. All you have to do is go and do the work and report the results, following the methods they agreed. If it doesn’t work, no problem, paper is still accepted. That prevents anybody from having to take negative results and “force” them to be positive in order to publish them.
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In case anybody doesn’t know, the reason Chinese hospitals are so notorious for dodgy papers is because doctors in their system need scientific publications to progress their careers. So basically every doctor in china wants a paper to get promoted. So when you see “miRNA-XX downregulates whatever by binding whatever in whichever cells” you ask yourself whether the 3x co-first author physician nephrologists at some rural hospital really have time to be running all of those luciferase assays and qPCRs. Or it’s reasonably likely to be ghost-written, or a paper mill.
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No personal attacks are accepted here @Cole . Last warning. Next time = ban. We’re all here to learn from each other and reach a common goal: better health.
Some MDPI and Frontiers journals are OK. I did actually cite some in our omega 3 discussion. The problematic one I mentioned was Nutrients if I reckon correctly, as “In 2018, Buckley and the other nine senior editorial board members resigned, claiming that MDPI “pressured them to accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.”” ( Nutrients (journal) - Wikipedia ).
On the other hand, Hindawi is certainly shit: Hindawi (publisher) - Wikipedia
In the fall of 2022, Hindawi announced the retraction of more than 500 articles in 16 of its scientific journals because of cheating involving some of its editors and peer reviewers.[21] By the end of 2023, the number of retractions in Hindawi journals had increased to over 7,000 and Wiley announced that it would discontinue the Hindawi brand and operate the journals under a new approach.[9] The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down in the wake of the bad news.[10]
In March 2023, multiple Hindawi journals were delisted from the Web of Science for concerns with their editorial practices.[28]
In 2023, several concerns about the linkage of some Hindawi’s journals (e.g. Mathematical Problems in Engineering) with research paper mills were noted.[43][44][45] After that, Wiley detected paper mill signs on 10-13 % of papers in Hindawi.[46] In 2023, Hindawi has retracted over 8,000 articles, exceeding the total number of retractions from all publishers combined in any prior year.[47]
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I agree that the system is broken. What is really needed is a process of formalised peer review on preprints. However, i don’t know how this could be established.
“How to Rule the World,” by Theo Baker, is a fine account of the Stanford fiasco. Baker investigated and exposed Tessier-Levigne as a student journalist for The Stanford Daily. He bravely stood his ground when attacked by the faculty.
I think they are all shitty, unfortunately. Problem is, almost every paper in those journals is published under some “guest editor” or “special edition”, so the quality control is incredibly inconsistent. Some guest editors will be diligent, while others are just desperate to fill their special issue.
I personally never submit there. I’d rather leave something as a non peer-reviewed pre-print than have it published with MDPI or Frontiers. Yes it’s a bit snobby, but I think it would be an overall negative mark on my career to have any sort of serious study published there. I also think that in the future those journals may get kicked out of Scopus, SCI(E) etc.
I have peer reviewed around 20 studies in total for MDPI journals, and as far as I could see, no matter how great the flaws in the study, they all got accepted in the end. I had one where the authors had literally used an ELISA kit specific for mice to measure some human samples. I think it was IL-6. They found nothing (of course), and used that to claim that their treatment didn’t induce any IL-6. No positive control, of course. I pointed it out in two rounds of revision… and the paper was accepted by the Editor anyway. After that, I stopped reviewing for them, because it’s a waste of time.
MDPI still emails me about 2x per week asking me to be a guest editor at various journals, offering discounts, vouchers etc.
Agree. Wiley bought it, which was a weird decision since Wiley is one of the most reputable publishers IMO. The “Advanced” series are very tough, and they’re one of the few publishers who takes reported research misconduct seriously. And they have lots of smaller, specialist journals.
Unfortunately, there’s no real way to say for sure that a paper is real/fake based on the journal where it’s published. Some of my colleagues publish great studies in MDPI. Some crappy studies get accepted by Nature/Science/Cell - look at the STAP cell fiasco, for example.
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It’s just as easy to be honest as it is to be a thief. The moral rewards are greater than the financial, and doing what is right flows naturally.
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While many question the integrity of the Chinese gov, I think they would prefer that research in medical science was factual and real.
They do have a large population that is aging and they, like every country in that situation, are paying for research results to improve the health of their population. In the hopes it reduces overall medical costs.
False research hurts them as it does the rest of the world.
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Yes, and FWIW when researchers in China do engage in misconduct, the penalties are quick and severe. The government really doesn’t like when you steal their money and embarrass them, and there is a lot less personal freedom of expression and legal protection compared to the USA.
It is my opinion that fraud in the US largely goes unpunished. Universities agree to run some sort of internal investigation, and maybe the PI gets suspended or banned for applying for grants for a set period of time. It’s extremely rare that anybody actually goes to jail, gets sued into oblivion etc.
One big example is Piero Anversa (Harvard) who published 30+ fake papers in NEJM, Circulation, Nature. Let to 9 figures of wasted funding, even some human clinical trials which started based on fraudulent data. Yet, in the end, he lost his job (he was at retirement age anyway) and Harvard ended up paying back NIH around $10M. However, he personally faced no jail time, and I am not aware of any consequences he faced aside from embarrassment. Dude is now into his mid-80s and living in Manhattan.
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