The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.
Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of “vegetative electron microscopy” shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.
After spotting the term, the Russian chemist, who goes by the pseudonym “Paralabrax clathratus” on PubPeer, left a comment about it in November 2022 on the online forum. He also mentioned the finding to fellow fraud buster Alexander Magazinov, a software engineer in Kazakhstan, who ran a Google Scholar search on the term and got several hits, some of which he flagged on PubPeer. Most of the articles included authors from Iran.
In one of his PubPeer comments, Magazinov speculated the phrase could have originated through faulty digital processing of a two-column article from 1959 in which the word “vegetative” appeared in the left column directly opposite “electron microscopy” in the right (the paper shows up in a Google search for “vegetative electron microscopy”). Perhaps an AI model had picked it up and spit it back into machine-generated text that was since plagiarized in other papers by the same Iranian network of fraudsters, Magazinov elaborated in an interview.
The term, mentioned in passing in a story from 2023 in the Spanish newspaper El País, was later incorporated into the Problematic Paper Screener. This automated tool combs through 130 million articles every week with nine detectors searching for new instances of known fingerprints, the improper use of synonyms to evade plagiarism detectors, and the misuse of generative AI. Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist who developed the program and a coauthor of our investigation in The Conversation, has posted a list of 78 papers the tool has flagged in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research alone.
Cabanac’s list includes the article the Russian chemist had first stumbled on, which was published in 2022. According to a PubPeer post by sleuth Nicholas Wise of the University of Cambridge in England, the paper, “Photodegradation of ibuprofen laden-wastewater using sea-mud catalyst/H2O2 system: evaluation of sonication modes and energy consumption,” matched an authorship ad in Farsi posted to the messaging platform Telegram in 2022. Its authors counted several researchers in Iran as well as Rafael Luque, a controversial and hyperprolific Spanish scientist who was suspended from his institution that same year.
Springer Nature retracted the paper in 2024 after an investigation “found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references, containing nonstandard phrases or not being in scope of the journal.”
No other work containing the term has been retracted so far. But an article coauthored by Luque has been corrected to remove “irrelevant citations,” and to change “vegetative electron microscopy” to “scanning electron microscopy” and “extracellular cells” to “extracellular membrane,” according to the Swiss-based publisher MDPI.
Luque did not answer emails seeking comment. Neither did the corresponding author of the retracted article, Mohsen Omidvar of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences, in Iran.
Meanwhile, Elsevier is defending the use of the odd wording, which appeared in a paper from February 2024 in the journal Industrial Crops and Products. The work, “Agricultural wastes: A practical and potential source for the isolation and preparation of cellulose and application in agriculture and different industries,” purportedly used “vegetative electron microscopy” to study the structure of bacterial cellulose derived from date syrup.
A spokesperson told us by email:
During our investigation, the Editor-in-Chief confirmed that ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ is a way of conveying ‘electron microscopy of vegetative structures’ so he was content with the shortened version to be used.
As pointed out by Magazinov on PubPeer, the senior author of the paper is Vijay Kumar Thakur, a special content editor at Industrial Crops and Products with a long record on PubPeer. Thakur, who is head of the Biorefining and Advanced Materials Research Centre at Scotland’s Rural College, in Edinburgh, did not respond to requests for comment.
Magazinov also said in his PubPeer comment that the paper contained “massive self-citation” by two of the authors, both based in Iran, an allegation the publisher said it was still investigating.
As for Elsevier’s explanation of “vegetative electron microscopy,” Magazinov told us:
So, we are learning that bacterial cellulose is a kind of “vegetative structure”. They are taking a piss without even pulling their pants down, aren’t they?
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That’s a column break. The phrase vegetative microscopy doesn’t happen in the paper. Read the columns, and you get “vegetative cell wall” and “by means of electron microscopy.”
If you don’t accept the column break existing, then nothing at all printed there makes sense–sentences change wildly across the break.
Come on.
The screenshot you’re referring to is not from the article in question. You really should read the whole post. Come on.
We know. That’s exactly what the article is saying: that the phrase may have made its way into the AI model via a faulty machine-reading from that scanned document from 1959. That scan is not presented as an example of the suspect paper; it’s presented as a plausible explanation for how the phrase came to be mistaken by the AI as a legitimate term.
Those are two different paragraphs. The phrase does not exist
The lack of reading comprehension here is stunning. The image is not from the paper. It is a possible source for that tortured phrase caused by an AI system misreading the column break.
This is an article printed in two-columns. The first phrase (first column) reads “It is by no means certain what happens to the vegetative cell wall”. The phrase printed in the second column reads “… examined the effect by means of electron microscopy”.
Not having read the full manuscript, I cannot comment on its veracity but the excerpt captured in your article does not illustrate it’s claim adequately.
The authors known the paper shown in the image (from 1959) is a column break. What they are discussing is the possibility that AI generated papers took this information and generated a fake term because the language learning model didn’t recognize it as a column break.
And that’s how you lose respect. Now I’m wondering who is writing YOUR articles.
Apparently half of the readers here failed to notice that the image is not from the paper, but from a potential source the AI generating the paper misread.
Dear previous commenters:
With all due respect, I urge you to read the entire article again. The scan showing “vegetative” and “electron microscopy” is not an excerpt from the suspect paper. It’s part of a theory about how the AI might have latched on to the nonsense phrase “vegetative electron microscopy” in the first place. The fact that the two terms are in separate columns/paragraphs and have nothing to do with each other is exactly the point.
The three commenters above me have completely misunderstood (or not even read) the article. ‘Vegetative electron microscopy, indeed does not appear as a phrase in the pictured manuscript, but is obtained by ignoring the column break. This is an error that any human with basic English literacy would never make, but a computer program or GenAI easily would. This is illustrating the suspected origin of this nonsense phrase that has subsequently been propagated through all these dodgy papers.
Interesting finding and investigation. I wish the rest of journals follow up.
The comments here suggest one reason why peer review may be missing things like this: reviewers just look at the title, glance at the figures, and make their comments without reading the full text of the article to understand the full context!
What happened today that attracted a group of commenters that didn’t read the article? Was this story featured on tiktok?
Quit. This is fake news. Even if it were true, it does not minimize the value of science. Some scientists are fallible humans. That does not make science a “conspiracy.”
It is true news, easily confirmed, scientists don’t accidentally insert tortured phrases into multiple articles, and absolutely nothing in this article suggests “science” is a “conspiracy”, which doesn’t even make sense as an accusation.