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Key Takeaways
- Major publishers have had to retract thousands of papers and shut down journals due to the influx of fake studies, indicating a systemic issue in academic integrity.
- The problem is compounded by low entry standards for academic journals and a network of complicity among editors and authors, making it difficult to combat the spread of fraudulent research.
Before buying into the latest study splashed across the headlines, better check the source.
In an increasingly troubling academic trend, companies dubbed “paper mills” are selling fake studies to researchers who need publications to keep their jobs or careers moving.
These fake scientific papers are being published in real journals at an alarming rate, according to a study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The number of fake papers doubled every 1.5 years between 2016 and 2020, and there are now tens of thousands in the scientific record, the research found.
The trend exploits vulnerabilities in the publication process, and major publishers like Wiley and Taylor & Francis have had to retract hundreds or thousands of papers at once and have even shut down some journals overrun by paper mills, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Researchers built a database of over 32,700 suspected fake papers linked to paper mills, and that’s just what has been identified so far — the study’s authors warned it’s likely an undercount, the Journal reported.
Ian Kingsbury, director of research at Do No Harm, told The College Fix the problem does not fall solely on dishonest or lazy researchers.
“There’s very low entry standards to becoming an academic publisher,” he said in an interview. “There are journals that are essentially fraudulent or even sometimes predatory.”
The problem doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
“Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating,” wrote Retraction Watch after examining the PNAS study.
“…The latest study confirms the large volume of suspected paper mill products have been doubling more than twice as fast as corrective measures — both official measures like retractions and unofficial channels like the number of crowdsourced comments flagging problematic papers on PubPeer,” according to Retraction Watch.
“It’s like emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,” study coauthor Luis Amaral, a professor at Northwestern University, told the outlet. Amaral did not respond to request for comment.
The problem lies with editors, too, the study found.
“We uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards,” the study states.
Kingsbury said that with the paper mill problem, “we are mostly talking about … low-quality, poorly cited journals that don’t have much cultural cache.”
In contrast, he told The Fix, the “ideological capture” of leading medical journals by radical gender ideology and DEI is a more significant problem.
These prominent journals have a greater influence and are harder to correct compared to paper mill-produced literature, he said.
Whereas AI and other detection strategies may be employed to flag paper mill-produced research, “there’s really no obvious levers that can be pulled for [prominent, radical] journals to correct themselves,” Kingsbury said.
The root of both issues appears to be academic publishing’s business-driven development. Kingsbury explains that many publishers are focused on fees, leading to widespread fraud across various scientific fields. The academic publishing process has morphed into a business model and has become wholly disconnected from “knowledge, production, and dissemination.”
