Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse. According to the notices, which have similar wording, the retractions come after the publisher identified problems with the articles including compromised peer review, inappropriate or irrelevant references, and nonsensical phrases, suggesting blind use of AI or machine-translation software.

Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France, first highlighted issues with the journal. His Problematic Paper Screener had flagged nearly 50 articles in Optical and Quantum Electronics riddled with tortured phrases, mostly published in 2023. "I suspect papermill submissions + compromised peer review," he wrote on X at the time, referring to shady services that sell authorship slots and citations on papers.

Another Springer Nature journal that seems to be retracting papers en masse is Environmental Science and Pollution Research. The journal was one of 17 that this year lost its Journal Impact Factor.