# The ongoing firehose of fake research papers
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Tags:** science-math
**Created:** [January 29, 2025, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579 "2025-01-29T14:43:55Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2025, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/21 "2025-01-31T13:13:16Z")
> [@PastTense](#):
>
> The vast majority of research doesn’t make any difference to the field.
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
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### Author:  [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2025, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/22 "2025-01-31T15:23:03Z")
I remember hearing years ago about a few universities that had a policy for considering someone for promotion/tenure. The candidate would give the committee their 5 best papers and the committee would evaluate their research quality based on those.
Quality over quantity.
I wished that was the general rule as would solve so many problems. OTOH, nowadays multi-author papers have gone crazy. Some have over a hundred authors. Getting your own contributions to stand out in that world is a big problem.
In any case, for too many research institutions the real measure is how much money your bring in.
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### Author:  [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2025, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/23 "2025-01-31T15:30:23Z")
“Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?”
Reminds me of Peter’s Theory of Entrepreneurial Aggressiveness in Higher Education, stated as: “Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.”
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2025, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/24 "2025-02-01T19:23:07Z")
> [@Alessan](#):
>
> Maybe that’s part of the problem.
Do you expect most papers to be significant? To follow the right path? A lot of papers are published in areas under investigation. There are multiple paths to follow to a solution, and most of them are going to be dead ends. But we don’t know which are dead ends until we explore them, do we?
Papers that seldom get referenced or used are nothing new. Over 50 years ago I knew someone at MIT who was doing a PhD in Physics based on some previous published work which he eventually found to be flawed. Took him an extra year to work around it. It wasn’t fraud, just a mistake.
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2025, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/25 "2025-02-01T19:29:23Z")
> [@Kent\_Clark](#):
>
> 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.
Exactly this. My daughter is a professor and she knows journal quality by heart. I know it in my field also, but it is relatively small so we don’t have an issue.
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#):
>
> 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 have a column in a journal, and used to do book reviews for them, and I often got offers to write a book on a subject I had mentioned in a satirical article. (My column consists of riffing on papers in that issue.)
I deleted the mail so I don’t know if they wanted money or not. I used to get a lot more offers from pay to publish places. That was decades ago.
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### Author:  [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2025, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/26 "2025-02-01T23:40:20Z")
I just started the first of two and it explains the issue well. Looking forward to listening to the rest. Thanks!
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### Author:  [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2025, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-firehose-of-fake-research-papers/1013579/27 "2025-02-01T23:55:53Z")
When I was taking chemistry at a community college in the late 1980s, a classmate asked our instructor why, with his credentials, he didn’t teach at a university. He replied that he could probably double or even triple his salary by doing so, but he would have had to do research and publish, and he didn’t want to do that; he only wanted to teach.
Makes sense to me.
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