The Trivedi Effect
“Mahendrakumar Trivedi does not need a Potion to make you fatter and more delicious; his psychic emanations are enough.”- Smut Clyde
Category: Academic Publishing
Crunchy Frog and Cockroach Cluster
“On one side: late-career scientists resorting to purchased promotion of their early-career papers. On the other side: whole new genres of paper-shaped artifacts that are little more than packaging for ever-larger citation cargoes, and papermillers no longer bothering to find buyers for naming rights on their products.” – Smut Clyde
Scientific Reports 2025: A Year in Review
“In this blog I write about papers published by Scientific Reports in 2025, so we could consider it to be a sort of “wrap-up” of highlights and special achievements in the world’s biggest scientific journal™ in 2025.” – Sholto David
The Fribourg Declaration
“The papermill crisis is not an external attack on science but a mirror held up to its dysfunctional ecosystem. The for-profit publishing industry, posing as a newly found saviour of research integrity, is in fact its chief beneficiary and enabler.” – Csaba Szabo
The Citation Payola
“The proposition that a niche of citation brokers exists, opens our eyes to other transaction options..” . Smut Clyde
The perfect MDPI editor
“I know you cannot understand such matters, since you appear to have strong mother-related problems that most likely have denied you of a satisfactory sexual life”, _ Enrico Sciubba, Editor-in-Chief
An unethical guide to 100.000 citations
“”A number of leading researchers have published their research contributions at this Journal among them Zhanhu Guo, Zhanhu Guo, Zhanhu Guo,….”
Correction: IMPOSSIBLE
“What is the threshold to distinguish between minor and major? What does “the majority of the results and conclusions” mean? ” – Aneurus Inconstans
The Miracle-Polymer-Dumbsterfire
“Read the damn paper and look at the figures before publishing it; it’s not that hard” – Archasia belfragei
Concerns for whites, retractions for the rest?
“Expressions of Concern may be used as an interim notice to flag a potential issue that may be ultimately resolved with another amendment outcome (e.g. retraction or correction) or they may remain as the final outcome in cases where conclusive evidence cannot be obtained. ” – COPE
For Better Science 