Widespread signs of paper milling discovered in materials science and engineering papers

Misidentification of scanning electron microscopes (SEM) in peer-reviewed papers could be a sign that they were produced by paper mills, researchers have claimed in a preprint.

According to the researchers, who are based at Northwestern University in the US, published research in materials science and engineering has, up until now, escaped questions about reliability and reproducibility that have recently hit other scientific fields.

However, users of post-publication peer review sites, such as PubPeer, have recently identified a significant number of articles where the make and model of the SEM listed in the text of the paper does not match the instrument’s metadata in images in the published article.