Databases hunt for structure fraud

In 2022, a study revealed that about 800 papers published in crystallography and exotic-chemistry journals originated from a paper mill. At the time, popular scientific sleuth David Bimler noted in the study that the papers in question appeared to recycle images, cite irrelevant papers, and contain irregularities in their methods sections. Paper mills are known for churning out made-up, plagiarized, and subpar papers. When one of its articles is accepted by a journal, the paper mill sells authorship slots to academic scientists trying to artificially inflate their publication count. In response to Bimler's study, the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), one of the most popular crystallography databases, flagged 992 crystal structures mentioned in the implicated papers. As of April 2023, the CSD had formally retracted 209 of the flagged structures after journals retracted some of the implicated papers. But many of the flagged structures remain in the database because they come