Abstract
The products of paper mills are a serious blight on the academic record. In their guidance material and professional development activities, research institutions should stress that using a paper mill is not only a serious form of cheating the work they sell is deeply flawed and could ruin the career of a researcher. Not every case is like this, in this case the flaws made it easy to detect the paper was from a paper mill. Institutions should have a mechanism too check whether the work being produced by its researchers has come from a paper mill.
Key points
- There is a rising threat to the scientific community and academic publishing from paper mills.
- A total of 451 suspicious papers that are potentially linked to the Russia-based paper mill ‘International Publisher’ LLC were identified in this study.
- Problematic papers potentially originating from ‘International Publisher’ LLC are characterized by collaboration anomalies; that is, diversity of affiliations in each paper, mismatch between the specialization of the authors and the topic of the manuscript, and so forth.
- Current systems for paper mill detection should be regularly monitored and improved.
Abalkina, A. (2023), Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: Evidence from a Russia-based paper mill. Learned Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1574
Publisher (Open Access): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1574?s=03
Publisher (Open Access): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1574?s=03
Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: Evidence from a Russia‐based paper mill
This study attempts to detect papers originating from the Russia-based paper mill ‘International Publisher’ LLC. A total of 1,063 offers to purchase co-authorship on a fraudulent papers published fro…