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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments – Retraction Watch (February 2022)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on March 16, 2022
Keywords: Authorship, Journal, Publication ethics, Research integrity, Research Misconduct, Research results

The Linked Original Item was Posted On March 21, 2022

Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. March 14 2020: Plastic bottles, takeaway boxes waste & dirty pollution on a seashore.

Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sleuths began identifying them a few years ago. But there may be a new way: Earlier this month, Adam Day, a data scientist at SAGE Publishing, posted a preprint on arXiv that used a variety of methods to search for duplication in peer review comments, based on the likelihood that paper mills “create fake referee accounts and use them to submit fake peer-review reports.” We asked Day several questions about the approach.

The publication of papers from paper mills represents cancer in the body of scientific literature, does real damage and can be dangerous.  They can also tarnish the reputation of a title.  Retraction Watch interviews Adam Day to talk about the identification of fabricated peer reviews and papers.

Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us a bit about the methods you used.

Adam Day (AD): This all started when an eagle-eyed editor at SAGE Publishing noticed that 2 different referees had left identical comments on 2 different peer-reviews. That seemed like a sure-sign that someone was attempting to game our peer-review system and it gave us the idea to survey our peer-review comments for more cases like this.

Initially, we treated the problem as being much like a plagiarism search. Just like when we search for plagiarism, we have a big collection of documents and we are looking for duplication of text in documents written by different authors. Most publishers are familiar with plagiarism-detection tools like iThenticate. However, after researching a long list of plagiarism-detection tools, none were found that were ideally suited to the task. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we built and tested some simple search methods. These are easy to implement and so we hope that the preprint helps others to perform the same searches.

How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments
Adam Day Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sle…

Related Reading

(Australia) How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals – Sydney Morning Herald (Harriet Alexander | January 2022)

Revealed: The inner workings of a paper mill – Retraction Watch (Brian E. Perron, et al | December 2021)

(China) China’s clampdown on fake-paper factories picks up speed – Nature (Holly Else | October 2021)

Putting a Stop to the Papermills, Part 2 – Wiley (Chris Graf | June 2021)

Publishers grapple with an invisible foe as huge organised fraud hits scientific journals – Chemistry World (Katrina Krämer | May 2021)

(Pakistan) The rising menace of scholarly black-market Challenges and solutions for improving research in low-and middle-income countries – JPMA Editorial (Aamir Raoof Memon, Farooq Azam Rathore | June 2021

(Russia) Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing: Evidence from Russia – Scholarly Kitchen (Anna Abalkina | February 2021)

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