I think we’ve all probably been aware of the ease of publishing, the profitability of publishing, and the pressure to publish all coming together to create fakery. I just don’t think I fully realized the scale of it.
It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up.
I have to say that by the time I reached the end of the article, that estimate seemed low. This was particularly dispiriting:
Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, submitted testimony for a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in July 2022. She noted that 700, or nearly 6%, of 12,000 cancer research papers screened had errors that could signal paper mill involvement. Byrne shuttered her cancer research lab in 2017 because the genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of an enormous number of fake papers. A rogue scientist fudging data is one thing, she said, but a paper mill could churn out dozens of fake studies in the time it took her team to publish a single legitimate one.
“The threat of paper mills to scientific publishing and integrity has no parallel over my 30-year scientific career …. In the field of human gene science alone, the number of potentially fraudulent articles could exceed 100,000 original papers,” she wrote to lawmakers, adding, “This estimate may seem shocking but is likely to be conservative.”
My wife finished her PhD 18ish months ago now. Her school worked on a shoestring, and so her degree was long delayed. She was often tempted to fudge numbers, but she’s lawful good and refused, so a lot of things in her thesis showed how things failed.
What torqued her off is that in trying various “cheap” means she gleaned from papers, about 60% of them failed. Of that, sure, say half of that was that the full details may not have been published, or she lacked the equipment. But she strongly suspects that far too many papers, even “honest” papers, fudge their numbers hard to meet academic demands.
One of the reasons (along with $$$) that she didn’t stay in academia, even though she really enjoyed teaching: publishing papers of questionable quality to keep the job would have killed her.
This has mainly happened before the advent of AI systems. It will get much worse now. Steve Lehto discussed a case where a scientist submits AI produced nonsense for a trial. The declaration was submitted and signed by this expert under penalty of perjury. But it gets better, this scientist was claiming to be an expert on AI but didn’t bother to read his own declaration on the dangers of AI he offered as expert testimony.
I started a thread a while ago about the junk AI produced papers that came into a conference I’m involved with.
The question about the study in the OP is which journals were surveyed? I think anyone heavily involved in a field know that there are some journals which you can pretty much believe in and some which would publish that the moon is made of green cheese. There are metrics around this, and researchers swear by them. There are other metrics around acceptance rates. Not all peer reviewed papers are equal.
I get several emails a week from purported “journals” that want to publish my work. They either charge me or charge the user. The one thing they all offer is quick publication which means little (actually no) refereeing. I delete them all. Academic publishing has become a racket.
I kind of feel like we’re moving out of the ‘information age’ into the ‘torrent of bullshit age’. Humanity seems to have discovered that lies, fabrication and nonsense are quicker and easier to produce than truth, facts and wisdom, but are (for the moment), just as easy, if not easier, to monetise.
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t think the activity is novel; the decision to go wholesale with it is the thing.
Who is benefiting from all these fake papers? Someone is making money, but I don’t understand how. I thought it often cost money to publish papers, you don’t make money.
The authors. To get tenure and good jobs in the academic world you need published research. Doing fake papers and getting it published in these kinds of journals is much easier than doing real research.
The academics need to get published to advance. So they pay publishers to “publish” faked but citable papers. And make it up when they’re hired or promoted and their university pays them (more).
The publishers charge hefty money for very little work. Some of them can even get some naïve academic libraries to subscribe to some of their BS. So they have awesome margins and can spawn additional ever-more obscure titles as fast as their fingers can type.
Ultimately it’s the universities worldwide which are paying for this crap as a tax on obtaining professors and researchers.
And we’re all paying for it as collective humanity in the form of a bullshit tax applied to every bit of actual knowledge that can’t be found in the blizzard of BS.
I had no idea tenured faculty were building their careers on this crap. Isn’t a house of cards that is bound to come crumbling down when you are caught with fake publications under your belt? And if there are an estimated 100,000 fake papers, that looks to be a LOT of faculty doing this.
It’ll probably be an ongoing arms race between those who commit fakery (and the predatory journals who enable it) and reputable journals using advanced AI detection, aided by an unpaid cadre of academics who expose such crap through their own investigations and on websites like PubPeer.
Along with outright fakery, threats to the scientific literature come from the increasing ability to post preprints that haven’t gone through peer review, as well as pseudo-journals that appear to accept virtually anything if the $$ is good enough or the paper aligns with their ideology (an example of the latter is “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” which mainly exists to push antivaccine garbage).
It’s a particularly acute problem in China, where there reportedly are heavy pressures to compete for jobs using one’s publication credentials but not enough time, money or opportunity to do actual research.
You’re not likely to get caught. The vast majority of research doesn’t make any difference to the field. So you publish a minor variation of the existing research and it is consistent with the established theories. Readers are going to either ignore it or consider it insignificant. Since it really doesn’t matter if it is fake no one is going to investigate. But in a great many places research like this will satisfy the publish or perish department chair [who know nothing about the specialty]. People are only going to investigate if it says something important [contradicts the established theories, for example].
Are you in US higher ed? What are your bona fides here? Just curious if your opinion is informed or not, particularly around US higher ed. And, can you point to the Chronical of Higher Ed articles that discuss this?
I asked my son about this. He just got his PhD last year and is now a post-doctoral, and just starting to be the lead author on papers. From what I gather, the final firewall against crap work is the tenure committees who have the final say on whether you go up or out. They know the good journals from the bad ones, and if your record only shows you’re being published in lousy publications, you’ll either end up at a lesser institution or get pushed out of academia entirely.