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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

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

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on June 17, 2021
Keywords: Authorship, Institutional responsibilities, Journal, Publication ethics, Research results, Researcher responsibilities

The Linked Original Item was Posted On May 25, 2021

3D illustration of a folder with focus on the word conference. Concept of call for papers or abstracts

‘As with many hidden criminal syndicates, you don’t always know what’s happening,’ says Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky about paper mills. They are the biggest organised fraud perpetrated on scientific journals ever, eroding scientists’ trust in the publishing system – and in each other.

Paper mills are a largely invisible, but existential problem for research and we don’t really know the extent of the problem.   Are research institutions doing enough?  Probably not.

While plagiarism and fraud isn’t new – individual researchers have been caught photoshopping electron microscopy images or inventing elemental analysis data – paper mills serve up professional fakery for their customers on an industrial scale. Buyers can apparently purchase a paper, or authorship of one, on any topic based on phony results to submit to a journal. This makes them not only harder to detect and crack down on, but also exponentially increases the damage they could do.

The extent of their operations became apparent in early 2020. Two independent groups of image detectives came across a number of manuscripts, all from different authors at different institutions working on different biomedical topics, that seemed to share strange inconsistencies – as if they had all used the same stock images. The set now contains almost 600 manuscripts. Another set of 125 was discovered only a few months later. And there could be 10 times as many professionally manipulated papers that have not yet been – and might never be – found, estimates science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik.

Publishers grapple with an invisible foe as huge organised fraud hits scientific journals
Hundreds of fake research manuscripts from paper mills have flooded biochemical and biomedical journals in recent years. But how do you stop large-scale fraud barely anything is known about?

Related Reading

(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

Imposters and Impersonators in Preprints: How do we trust authors in Open Science? – Scholarly Kitchen (Leslie D. Mcintosh | March 2021)

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science – Nature (Holly Else & Richard Van Noorden | )

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

(China) China’s ‘paper mills’ are grinding out fake scientific research at an alarming rate – coda (Isobel Cockerell | November 2020)

(China) China’s research-misconduct rules target ‘paper mills’ that churn out fake studies – Nature (Smriti Mallapaty | August 2020)

Digital magic, or the dark arts of the 21st century – how can journals and peer reviewers detect manuscripts and publications from paper mills? (Papers: Jennifer A. Byrne & Jana Christopher | February 2020)

(India) India’s Fight Against Predatory Journals: An Interview with Professor Bhushan Patwardhan – Scholarly Kitchen (Tao Tao | February 2020)

(Australia) Mums and dads ‘bigger problem’ than essay mills – Times Higher Education (John Ross | November 2019)

The F-word, or how to fight fires in the research literature

‘Dodgy’ articles in academic journals threatens integrity of South African science – News24 (Tony Carnie | September 2017)

(Australia) Fake science: Taxpayers shell out more than $3 million for unreliable research – SMH (Timna Jacks | April 2017)

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