Fraudulent scientific papers are rapidly increasing

Observer

7 days ago

For years, whistleblowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern.
A team of researchers found evidence of shady organisations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.
'If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,' said Luís A Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries.
'Science relies on trusting what others did, so you do not have to repeat everything,' Amaral said.
As more graduate students were trained in labs, the competition for a limited number of research jobs sharpened. High-profile papers became essential for success, not just for landing a job, but also for getting promotions and grants.
Organisations known as paper mills are now turning scientific fraud into a lucrative business. Scientists eager to pad out their resumes can pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to be named as an author of a paper that they had nothing to do with, according to Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at Free University of Berlin who studies paper mills.
The manuscript might be provided to the paper mill by a dishonest scientist for a price; in other cases, it might be generated in house. To ensure the papers get published, paper mills sometimes offer bribes to corrupt editors, according to an investigation by the Center for Scientific Integrity.
Abalkina said that such papers are typically riddled with fraud — everything from doctored images to plagiarised text. To avoid plagiarism detectors, paper mills often use artificial intelligence to alter the text they lift from other papers, sometimes introducing bizarre phrasing such as 'bogus upside' instead of 'false positive.' Even as paper mills have worked to keep their efforts hidden, Abalkina has traced the output of companies in Russia, Iran and other countries, and found thousands of their papers in print.
Amaral and his colleagues have now analysed those patterns, using network theory and other statistical techniques. 'We tried to give a picture of what's below the surface,' said Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and an author of the new study.
For their analysis, the scientists built a database of more than 1 million scientific papers. They searched for the papers in online forums where sleuths share duplicated images and tortured phrases, as well as the Retraction Watch Database, maintained by the Center for Scientific Integrity.
The researchers compiled a list of 30,000 papers that have either been retracted or show signs of having come from a paper mill. They discovered connections between the papers that strongly hinted that they were the product of large-scale fraud. Many of these connections linked clusters of editors and authors who often worked together.
'There are huge networks that are very densely connected, where they're all sending their papers to one another,' Richardson said. 'If that's not collusion, I don't know what is.' The scientists found more evidence of paper mills by looking at duplicated images. Some papers contained images copied from more than one other paper. Mapping the connections between them, the researchers charted networks of thousands of papers. The papers in a cluster all tended to be published in the same short window of time, often in journals put out by a single publisher.
The best explanation Amaral sees for the pattern of this network is that paper mills are creating banks of images that they use to create entire batches of papers, which they then peddle to certain corrupt editors. After a while, the paper mills make new images and find new targets.
The papers that Amaral and his colleagues could study came to light only because of the work of independent sleuths. To estimate how many paper mill papers have yet to be exposed, Amaral's team created a statistical model that accurately predicted the rate at which suspicious papers surfaced. They estimate that the number of paper mill products may be 100 times greater than the ones they have identified.
Elisabeth Bik, a California-based expert on scientific fraud who was not involved in the study, said that it confirmed her early suspicions.
Amaral and his colleagues warn that fraud is growing exponentially. In their new study, they calculated that the number of suspicious new papers appearing each year was doubling every 1.5 years. That's far faster than the increase of scientific papers overall, which is doubling every 15 years.
Amaral and his colleagues found evidence that paper mills are selectively targeting certain fields to publish dubious papers. The team compared research on different versions of RNA, a molecule that has many roles in the cell. Papers on a form of RNA called microRNA and its role in cancer were much more likely to show signs of possible fraud than other RNA-related fields, such as the gene editing technology CRISPR.
But Amaral suspects that paper mills will eventually turn their attention to other fields as well.
In an executive order in May on 'gold-standard science,' President Donald Trump drew attention to the problem of scientific fraud. 'The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research,' the order stated.
But the administration has not offered any new initiatives to address the problem. Thousands of scientists have protested the order, arguing that it would lead to the political muzzling of genuine scientific findings.