Paper Mills, Sham Journals, and Stolen Reputation: Fraud and Greed are Poisoning Science

Paper Mills, Sham Journals, and Stolen Reputation: Fraud and Greed are Poisoning Science

Scientific fraud is surging at an unprecedented rate, driven by organized networks manipulating the very foundations of academic publishing.

In recent weeks, new research has revealed the alarming scale and speed of this crisis, with shocking evidence that data fabrication and falsification are now outpacing legitimate scientific publications.

A major study published by Northwestern University this August, entitled “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly,”  revealed that organized science fraud networks are extensive, resilient, and growing rapidly. The investigation analyzed retracted publications, image manipulation, and metadata across databases such as PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, revealing coordinated global efforts to flood the literature with fake research.

The scale of the problem is staggering and is perhaps the biggest crisis facing real science today.

By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.

The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors argue these findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community, which needs to act before the public loses confidence in the scientific process.

The authors investigated how systematic publication manipulation (especially involving organized entities like paper mills and brokers) represents a mounting threat to scientific integrity.

The findings were astonishing. The analysis demonstrated that there are large, interconnected networks of authors and editors collaborating across multiple journals to facilitate falsified activity, often evading detection and interventions such as retractions or journal de-indexing (in which an academic journal is removed from a bibliographic database). Fraudsters strategically target specific journals and subfields that are vulnerable to exploitation. Their operations rapidly adapt by “journal hopping,” whereby they switch to new journals when the old ones are deindexed or scrutinized.

The authors go into detail about the disturbing developments surrounding “paper mills”, designed to give paying contributors scientific prestige that is not earned through actual research and original analysis.

We and others have also recently described a class of entities engaging in large scale scientific fraud, typically denoted “paper mills,” that sell mass-produced low quality and fabricated research articles (as described by Byrne et al. (25) and in a report by the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (26); also see SI Appendix) In a 2022–2023 survey of medical residents at tertiary hospitals in southwest China, 46.7% of respondents self-reported buying and selling papers, letting other people write papers, or writing papers for others (27). Some publishers report that up to 1 in 7 of their submissions are of probable “paper mill provenance” (26, 28). Agents for paper mills have also recently been reported to attempt to bribe journal editors (29, 30) and to “hijack” the entire editorial processes at some journals (31–33).

What is the reason for all this manipulation?  Consider that someone waving around military honors they didn’t earn has “stolen valor.” In this situation, where more publications lead to raises, promotions, and grants, each fake paper contributes to a “stolen reputation.”  It’s a toxic amalgamation of greed and arrogance.

The analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has a conclusion that his damning.

The trends we expose forecast serious risks ahead for the scientific enterprise. Large groups of editors and authors appear to have cooperated to facilitate publishing fraud (Fig. 1). Networks of linked fraudulent articles suggest industrial scale of production (Fig. 2). Organizations selling contract cheating services anticipate and counter deindexing and other interventions by literature aggregators (Fig. 3). The literature in some fields may have already been irreparably damaged by fraud (Fig. 4). Finally, the scale of activity in the enterprise of scientific fraud already exceeds the scope of current punitive measures designed to prevent fraud (Fig. 5). Currently implemented punitive measures are not addressing the tide of fraudulent science. First, papers published in deindexed journals remain a part of the record of the scientific literature in some literature aggregators (SI Appendix, Fig. S21). Second, retractions are still a relatively infrequent occurrence, far below what one would reasonably expect for clearly fraudulent papers (90). Only 8,589 of the 29,956 suspected paper mill products in our corpus that have a corresponding record in OpenAlex have been retracted (28.7%). Extrapolating from current trends, we estimate that only around 25% of suspected paper mill products will ever be retracted and that only around 10% of suspected paper mill products will ever reside in a deindexed journal (SI Appendix, Fig. S23). Collectively, these findings show that the integrity of the extant scientific record and of future science is being undermined through the shortcomings in the very systems through which scientists infer the trustworthiness of each other’s work.

The authors are sounding the alarm.

“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries.

“Science relies on trusting what others did, so you do not have to repeat everything,” Dr. Amaral said.

Suppose the apparent pace of unrestrained scientific fraud continues unchecked. In that case, our ability to make progress in critical fields essential to civilized living (e.g., medicine, energy, public health, and national security) will be severely compromised. Public trust in scientific research is steadily corroding, and false findings presented as “trustworthy” have already impacted policy-making in ways that are expensive and harmful.

As scam research permeates scholarly literature and AI models trained on this data propagate misinformation, the very knowledge base on which we rely for scientific research becomes dangerously compromised. Without decisive action, society risks a future where science is no longer science, but high-tech voodoo.

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