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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

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

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in on December 30, 2021

The Linked Original Item was Posted On December 20, 2021

The word "books/journals/articles" in a background of blurry library books shelves.

In 2019, Retraction Watch ran an exclusive story of a Russian paper mill operating under the business name “International Publisher LLC”.  Since then, Retraction Watch and  other scientific news and blogging sites have continued to report on the activities of research paper mills, including International Publisher  and its primary website, 123mi.ru.  These mills provide an array of fraudulent services to researchers and academics seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals.  The services they provide include ghostwriting, brokering authorship positions on papers accepted for publication, and falsifying data.

A very interesting deeper dive into the troubling operation of paper mills.  These lucrative and shady businesses have the potential to do serious damage to the scholarly ecosystem and public trust in research and academia.  A useful read for anyone responsible for an institution’s Research Integrity arrangements.  We need to have good detection systems and harshly punish users of paper mills. We have included links to 11 related items.

Our project  augments this stream of reports about paper mills as we focus on the activities of International Publisher and the papers brokered through 123mi.ru.  As part of this project we are curating  a database of all the papers and authorship positions that have been advertised on this website.  Our database consists of roughly 2,353 unique article titles with 8,928 authorship positions.  While the majority of the known paper mill activity has been in the biomedical sciences, our work on just this one paper mill demonstrates that paper mill products have infiltrated multiple scientific disciplines in which career advancement is heavily reliant on academic publications.

So far, we have identified nearly 200 published articles that may have been brokered through this paper mill and which cross disciplines including (but not limited to) humanities, social sciences, nursing, and education.  We also observe numerous papers on COVID-19 that have been or currently are advertised for sale.

Revealed: The inner workings of a paper mill
A company in Russia hawks its wares In 2019, Retraction Watch ran an exclusive story of a Russian paper mill operating under the business name “International Publisher LLC”. Since then, Retra…

Related Reading

(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)

The raw truth about paper mills (Papers: Jana Christopher | 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

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

Changes in the Scientific Information Environment During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Importance of Scientific Situational Awareness in Responding to the Infodemic – Mary Ann Liebert, Inc (John K. Iskander | December 2020)

(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)

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

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