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
In April 2023, Michael Börsch received what he describes as the laziest peer review in his 30-year career as a biophysical chemist. Reviewer 1 had given detailed feedback on his manuscript about an enzyme that drives the production of the energy-carrying molecule ATP, but Reviewer 2’s comments were, in Börsch’s view, “stupid”.
