Pro bono decontamination of the scientific literature: How sleuths track errors and fraud with the Problematic Paper Screener

Imagine reading invulnerable framework, glucose bigotry, and nucleic corrosive (instead of immune system, glucose intolerance, and nucleic acid.) in a scientific paper published in an established journal with Impact Factor from an haute couture publisher such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer… Well, we identified more than 16k such problematic papers featuring ‘tortured phrases’ produced by paraphrasing tools to deceive plagiarism detection. In 2021, this issue affected 3 every 10k papers. Scammers produce such unreliable papers in bulk to appear hyper productive; they organise citation rings to increase their h-index.This talk presents how sleuths strive to decontaminate the literature from this digital pollution. A handful of professional scientists and hobbyists re-assess the suspect papers flagged by the ‘Problematic Paper Screener‘, contribute pro bono post-publication peer reviews on PubPeer, and eventually manage to get publishers retract 3000+ papers, mostly in engineering and biomedicine. We also discuss the domino effect of retractions and the necessity to issue chain retractions to stop errors from propagating in the literature.