A forensic dive into a 2025 Springer Nature edited volume on nanocomposites exposes pervasive low-quality scholarship: AI-generated, nonsensical graphics, hallucinated text and references, and routine figure plagiarism and mis‑citations. The book’s opening chapter by an editor contains an eye-popping AI composite; other chapters reuse identical figures that first appeared in 2020-2024 papers across journals (examples include images traceable to 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 publications), while some figures are credited to the wrong sources or to entirely different articles. The piece catalogs specific mismatches (e.g., a figure attributed to “Ng et al. 2020” that actually appears in a 2024 Taylor & Francis piece) and documents recurrence of the same visuals across multiple chapters and external reviews.
The argument is systemic: major publishers’ editorial and production pipelines routinely allow machine-made nonsense and blatant plagiarism into book chapters, a problem amplified by digital/print-on-demand models and subscription sales to institutions. Such output often goes unread and unvetted, yet consumes public funds and corrodes research integrity. The findings call out a “publisher‑papermill” dynamic - AI slop, hallucinated references and sloppy figure reuse - urging stronger oversight, automated detection and accountability from editors, publishers and libraries.
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