The Qalypso School on Quantum Science in Malta returns for its 3rd edition Aug 31 - Sep 4 this year! 🏖️
We have a great line up of lecturers covering Quantum Optimisation, Quantum Thermodynamics and Quantum Gibbs Sampling.
Pre-registrations opens today at forms.gle/3NkMJ3Br9V8b...
Do Share!
image from Gemini Nano Banana Pro for prompt:
"Create an image of the number 2026 but make it look like AI slop on purpose"
All in all, it's great to be more and more integrated in the community - it also helps me to be more balanced, and less focused on just some numbers.
🫶 Thanks to all colleagues, it's great to work with you all.
🎆 Happy New Year!!! 🎆
E.g....
- invitation to give a talk at a conference
- invitation to be a PhD defense jury member
- invitation to give a lecture at a summer school
- having my research covered by my institute's website
- having my (side-project) research covered by news reporters
- editor's recommendation
Citation-count-addiction is horrible, but it's one of the few points of feedback that young researchers get.
I'm quite grateful for what 2025 brought, particularly more diverse feedback/verification from the community; things I didn't really expect would come my way:
Well deserved!! Congratulations :) :)
I'm also surprised by this. Not too issues in this need peer reviewing.... They are just there. On the website. In the API.
Anyway, they probably just want to buy some time before giving a full statement... I guess
🚩 Our recent work on noise-robustness in a triangle quantum network got covered by ICFO. :)
👇 Have a look below
or check out the full article: arxiv.org/abs/2503.24213
Luckily it's getting some press coverage
retractionwatch.com/2025/11/11/b...
A great read by Retraction Watch.
✅ Nice to see that some Article 1 authors, McCoy et al., actively tried to get help from Springer Nature to fix the incorrect citations to their paper.
😐 Seems like Scopus and Web of Science also have the distorted citations.
Delighted to see the work covered here!! Great write-up in my opinion.
👍 a pleasure
I truly wonder how many people noticed over the past 14 years that something is off :D
I think many people might have noticed that the "This article is cited by" section is sometimes ... a bit off. But not sure how many api users there are at all.
Thanks for pointing this out!
Yes, it seems that there are mismatches in these things even internally within Springer Nature.
Great to see Zotero community actively finding and patching these things where they can. :)
Thx for the read. Share if you care. Read the article, especially plots and screenshots.
scirate.com/arxiv/2511.0...
🙏
And most importantly, double check your References!!
📚Journals affected? Thousands
📝Articles affected? Hundreds of thousands or even millions
🧑🔬Authors affected? Millions
⏰Since when? Most probably since 2011, when the API was released.
This leads all studied scientific reference databases to have incorrect references...
including the journal's own websites!! (check "This article is cited by" section for any article 1)
Article 1s have multiple std devs more citations than others, across many years and sources.
So:
❌ No article number returned by API.
❗️"Number" 1 returned for almost all articles.
‼️ Page Number 1 returned for ALL articles.
✅A recipe for disaster? Yes
📜Wait but there is PAGE NUMBER, isn't that good?
Nope.
In online-only Springer Nature journals, ALL articles are assigned a starting page number of 1.
Also, many are assigned an Issue Number of 1 (see "number" field). Almost all these journals have only one issue per volume
What's going on????
Well, it turns out if you request article metadata in json format via the SprinerLink API of Springer Nature, then you get
- DOI
- title
- authors
- year
- volume
- page number
- ....
🤯 BUT NO ARTICLE NUMBER!!! 🤯
Another weird thing: if we plot the citation count histograms of Nature Communications articles published on January 2nd 2025, we see the following.
The one article having about 10x the citations of other articles of the same age?
Article #1.
5️⃣/🔟 In Scientific Reports, 5 of the top 10 most cited articles have an article number of 1.
5️⃣/🔟 In Nature Communications the same: 5 of the top 10 are article 1s.
Coincidence? 👇
scirate.com/arxiv/2511.0...
I think not.
I'm glad to say this recently found a home in PRL after a very enlightening publishing process :)
doi.org/10.1103/nwzw...
What a pleasure to teach in Gdansk at the Frontiers of Machine Learning in Quantum Technologies 2025 Summer School :)
It's a first for me, but really enjoying. Amazing students. I was lucky enough to see their flash presentations as well.
Thx and congrats to the organizers.
📣 Calling young quantum researchers!
Join us at #YQIS25 in Barcelona — a conference by young scientists, for young scientists. Present your work, connect, & help shape the future of quantum information science!
Register now 👉 icfo.eu/event/4000/8...
📅 Register by August 15.
8th International Conference for Young Quantum Information Scientists
www.quantiki.org/conference/8...
Of course I lost my poster along the way, so I improvised a bit :D
Man, CEQIP venue is just another level. Amazing to be here :)
This helps to close the detection loophole in experiments, where up to here people had to do global post-selection to keep only rounds when all photons arrived.
Using heralding information from an SPDC source for example, we show how this detection loophole can be closed.
not only tariffs are rising... but also number of photons ;)
We found a simple setup for nonlocality in the triangle using 2-photon sources that is ~50% robust to photon loss, vs. the ~5% that we had for single photon sources.
