Meet a sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions

Nick Wise had always been “slightly interested” in research integrity and fraud, just from working in science. 

Then, last July, from following image sleuth Elisabeth Bik on Twitter, he learned about the work of Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov identifying “tortured phrases” in published papers. 

Such phrases – such as “bosom peril,” meaning “breast cancer” – are computer-generated with translation or paraphrasing software, perhaps by authors seeking to fill out their manuscripts or avoid plagiarism detection. 

Cabanac, Labbé, and Magazinov had started with tortured phrases in the field of computer science, so Wise decided to try his hand at finding them in his own field, fluid dynamics. 

He got a thesaurus widget, started plugging in phrases like “heat transfer,” and Googled the results – “heat move,” “warmth exchange,” etc. 

“Up popped a load of papers,” said Wise, age 30, who recently wrapped up his PhD in architectural fluid dynamics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and will be starting a postdoc there soon. 

It was the beginning of a sleuthing hobby that has already resulted in more than 850 retractions. 

Around the time Wise started playing with tortured phrases, he discovered PubPeer and started posting his findings under his initials and last name, N.H. Wise. He’d visit the site every day to see if anything new or weird had been posted, and started seeing more and more issues with publications beyond tortured phrases. 

“Once you start looking at lots of bad papers, if they’re cutting corners and doing one thing wrong, they’re often doing something else wrong as well,” he said.

Wise also submitted the new tortured phrases he was finding to the Problematic Paper Screener – so many that Cabanac got in touch with him and added him to a private Slack group for discussing research integrity. 

It was through the Slack group that Wise first saw ads for authorship, when another sleuth shared a link to a Facebook page. 

“I clicked through and started scrolling, and then you go, “Oh, God,” Wise said. 

“There’s this entire economy, ecosystem of Facebook groups, Whatsapp groups, Telegram channels selling authorship for papers, selling citations, selling book chapters, selling authorship of patents.” 

He started scrolling through the Facebook pages and searching on Google to find the papers with authorship advertised for sale. 

Sometimes it was easy, if the ad included the full title of the paper, such as “Psychometric Validation of the Indonesian Version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale: Personality Traits Predict the Fear of COVID-19,” which Wise found advertised on Facebook and published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. 

He posted the ad on PubPeer, where one of the authors responded that, “We have no idea who posted the fake Facebook advert about this paper but it was not any of the co-authors.” (The discussion went downhill from there.) 

If the ad only provided keywords in the title, it was much harder, if not impossible. 

Still, Wise has posted findings on PubPeer about hundreds of papers, pointing out irrelevant references, tracking down the source text of a plagiarized paper with many tortured phrases, and identifying authorship oddities such as an article that lists the French city of Clermont Ferrand as its corresponding author.

Cabanac and Labbe previously told us that Wise “is an innovator: he designs clever methods to expose fraud.” Put another way: “He rocks!”

“I like digging around on the internet and trying to Google things,” Wise told us. 

Plus, the work is “an excellent time sink,” said Wise. “Any good reason not to write your thesis.” 

Beyond finding tortured phrases or advertisements for authorship of individual papers and posting them on PubPeer, Wise has also begun investigating journal special issues and conference proceedings, which are ripe for paper mill activity because peer review is often outsourced. 

The bulk of the more than 850 retractions Wise’s work has led to came from conference proceedings journals of IOP Publishing in two groupings: 350 announced in February, and 500 announced in September. 

For the batch of 500, Wise had noticed a pattern in the titles of some papers, and had a hunch something was off with them. He emailed some examples to Kim Eggleton, IOP’s head of peer review and research integrity, with whom he’d developed a rapport from previous work. 

As Eggleton told us previously, the publisher began investigating and found other similarities between the papers that indicated one source was behind the content – perhaps a paper mill. IOP eventually identified nearly 500 papers to retract. 

It was “very satisfying” that IOP’s investigation confirmed his hunch, said Wise, and he respects that the publisher moved quickly on his tip. The same can’t be said of others. 

“The same reason those 500 papers were retracted in IOP, there’s a good ten times that many elsewhere,” Wise said. 

Eggleton told us she’s always grateful for Wise’s help. 

“As I understand it, Nick does this work in his spare time, and his only motivation is cleaning up science,” she said. 

That’s true of a lot of sleuths, whose work is sometimes – but often not – credited.

“We really appreciate the relationship we’ve built with Nick, and a number of other independent ‘sleuths’ who tip us off about things that don’t seem right,” Eggleton said. “They’re a valuable extension of the team and complement the work we are doing in-house to manage misconduct.”  

Wise said it’s harder to prove that, for example, an entire special issue is corrupt, without publishers getting involved, like Eggleton at IOP.

“There’s nothing I or anyone outside can do,” he said. “Unless you get their engagement, you can’t do anything, and that’s quite frustrating.” 

Other times, Wise has found multiple suspicious elements in a paper, such as lots of citations, unlikely collaborations between authors in different countries and fields, but no advertisement, no smoking gun. 

He said he doesn’t want to make accusations or judge, just provide evidence. 

“There’s times where you’re like, ‘There’s definitely something up here, but I have no evidence really – apart from this looks very unlikely – to say that something’s up.’ I’m mindful of that,” he said. “I’m just a guy.”

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