A waste of time for all of us’: caught in the crossfire of the peer-review wars Review mills — researchers who write fake referee reports with coercive citation requests — are setting off a war in academic publishing. What happens to those caught in the middle? By Katarina Zimmer Illustration by Andreion De Castro 3 August 2026

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-01360-8/index.html?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=2923aae61a-nature-briefing-daily-20260811&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-33f35e09ea-50432164 In 2024, publisher MDPI added warnings to several papers to indicate that they were victims of ‘review mills’ — individuals or groups who duplicate reviewer reports, probably with the goal of increasing the number of times their or their collaborators’ papers are cited. “We did solid science,” says biophysical chemist Michael Börsch, the author of one flagged paper, but the mill’s work has left some of his team’s output tainted by wrongdoing. “For my PhD student, it’s a disaster to have his first paper branded like this,” he adds.