Gwynn Elfring

Professor @ubcmech, @ubcmath University of British Columbia 🇨🇦🇳🇱🇲🇽 fluid mechanics, soft (active) matter, complex fluids

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

Densitaxis! https://t.co/4d1nPt6XVp

Delighted to see @Vaseem_S0's work finally in print @PNASNews.

I'll try to explain the story behind this work in a 🧵 below... [1/18]

[Lior Pachter @lpachter]

This person has published 71 papers in 143 days so far in 2026. That is, 2 days per paper (source: Google Scholar).

It's truly amazing. To see someone proud of this.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Science is about to get absolutely nuked.

Unless we get extremely strict about providing and opening up code and data and documenting lab experiments rigorously, a torrent of credible-looking but fraudulent papers is upon us.

[Physical Review Fluids @PhysRevFluids]

Organisms often swim through inhomogeneous environments, such as viscoelastic fluids, where gradients in viscosity and elasticity may arise.
A new Letter shows that spatial variations in fluid relaxation time induce durotactic behavior in active particles.
https://t.co/JwmBIyrynM

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

@aapahlavan Congrats Amir, well done!

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

@sinichol @ESPNF1 🙄

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

@DrShimaParsa @RITtigers Congrats Shima!

[Peyman Milanfar @docmilanfar]

at a conference where you don’t have to present

[The Society of Rheology @SoRheology]

The Society of Rheology is sad to announce the passage of 1994 Bingham Medalist Professor Andreas Acrivos. Prof. Acrivos and his numerous students and colleagues have made impactful and lasting contributions to rheology theory and practice.

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

@maziyarj @PNASNews @nicoschramma Very nice Mazi!

[Publishing with Integrity @fake_journals]

Who reviewed this paper?

A few days ago @gcabanac tweeted about a paper that had published a remark that it had been forced to cite irrelevant papers. You can see the tweet here: https://t.co/FpSr5QLPfW. We remarked that if it was not so serious, it would be funny.

Since reading that tweet, we have not been able to get it out of our head, so we thught that we would document it in a little more detail. We are doing this for three reasons.

1️⃣ In our view, it descerves more detail to be made available.

2️⃣ We'd like these details to be be kept as a matter of public record, so we are posting similar posts on our X account and our LinkedIn account.

3️⃣ It should be of interest to this community, so we hope that this raises even further the ethical issues around this topic.

The first image shows the paper that we are looking at. What is interesting is the text that appears on at the end of the introduction (highlighted in red). This appears to show that the reviewer insisted that a set of 13 papers be cited, else they would not accept the paper. It would be interesting to see the review repport, so that we could be certain what had been said. If you want to see the paper, it is available here: https://t.co/mlv5UDdp5T

In the rest of this 🧵, we show the papers that have been asked to be cited (i.e. [35]-[47]). These have been taken from the paper mentioned above. You'll notice (as we have highlighted it) that every paper is "et al." meaning, of course, that there are quite a few authors on each paper.

Gicven that we cannot see all the authors, the other images on this 🧵 shows the full set of authors on each of these 13 papers.

We leave it an an exercise for the reader to hazard a guess as to the reviewr is?

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

@AlbanSauret @UofMaryland @umdme @ClarkSchool Congrats and good luck on the move!

[Princeton University @Princeton]

Howard Stone, a leading engineering scholar and pioneer in fluid dynamics research, has been named University Professor, Princeton’s highest honor for faculty. https://t.co/GmPV9wqJFK

[Mu Yang, Ph.D. @mumumouse2]

By issuing "Corrections" without doing investigation, the publishers are in effect laundering fraud into the literature, cementing misinformation and justifying the existence of papermill and other fraudsters. One could argue that such corrections are worse than fraud.

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

We have to do something about this. Sooner, rather than later. The public will lose trust in science and then…

And we’ll kick ourselves for letting this madness go on unhindered.

[Mu Yang, Ph.D. @mumumouse2]

Last author has WELL OVER 100 papers (most not reviews) in 2024. You know how to do that? Well, you just have to be willing to say :We really apologize for this mistake" and chop off the peaks that the mouse lady doesn't like, and Elsevier will ensure nobody talks about it again. https://t.co/g7YvNPLYtz

[Retraction Watch @RetractionWatch]

New engineering dean has two retractions for authorship manipulation.
https://t.co/tqJhuGqNWR

[David Sivak @DavidASivak]

Applications received by November 15, 2024 will receive full consideration. For a full description and application instructions, see
https://t.co/QPev5l2C4T
(For dual-career searches, tenure-track positions in other areas of Physics will be posted to this link soon.)

[Penn Bioengineering @pennbioeng]

The Department of #PennBioengineering at @PennEngineers is engaged in a multi-year effort to fill tenure-track and tenured positions at the Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor levels.

Learn more and apply here (applications due November 26, 2024): https://t.co/6aaJwHrFOd

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

@costa_p No.

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

More details can be found here: https://t.co/VATskgnlXy

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

Sébastien Michelin and I would like to advertise the immediate opening of a PhD position at LadHyX (École Polytechnique, France) in joint supervision with UBC (Canada).

[Gwynn Elfring @gelfring]

The project will focus on microswimmers in density gradients with a specific emphasis on theoretical analysis and simple numerical modeling of the individual and collective dynamics of microswimmers in stratified media, and its implication on mixing.