AI will soon be able to audit all published research — what will that mean for public trust in science?
Yet problems slip through. A range of grassroots and institutional initiatives work to identify problematic papers, strengthen the peer-review process, and clean up the scientific record through retractions or journal closures. But these efforts are imperfect and resource intensive.
Soon, artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to supercharge these efforts. What might that mean for public trust in science?
Peer review isn't catching everything
In recent decades, the digital age and disciplinary diversification have sparked an explosion in the number of scientific papers being published, the number of journals in existence, and the influence of for-profit publishing. This has opened the doors for exploitation.
Opportunistic 'paper mills' sell quick publication with minimal review to academics desperate for credentials, while publishers generate substantial profits through huge article-processing fees. Corporations have also seized the opportunity to fund low-quality research and ghostwrite papers intended to distort the weight of evidence, influence public policy and alter public opinion in favour of their products.
These ongoing challenges highlight the insufficiency of peer review as the primary guardian of scientific reliability. In response, efforts have sprung up to bolster the integrity of the scientific enterprise.
Retraction Watch actively tracks withdrawn papers and other academic misconduct. Academic sleuths and initiatives such as Data Collada identify manipulated data and figures.
Investigative journalists expose corporate influence. A new field of meta-science (science of science) attempts to measure the processes of science and to uncover biases and flaws. Not all bad science has a major impact, but some certainly does. It doesn't just stay within academia; it often seeps into public understanding and policy.
In a recent investigation, we examined a widely-cited safety review of the herbicide glyphosate, which appeared to be independent and comprehensive. In reality, documents produced during legal proceedings against Monsanto revealed that the paper had been ghostwritten by Monsanto employees and published in a journal with ties to the tobacco industry. Even after this was exposed, the paper continued to shape citations, policy documents and Wikipedia pages worldwide.
When problems like this are uncovered, they can make their way into public conversations, where they are not necessarily perceived as triumphant acts of self-correction. Rather, they may be taken as proof that something is rotten in the state of science.
This 'science is broken' narrative undermines public trust.
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Hindustan Times
07-08-2025
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Fraudulent scientific papers are booming
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The Hindu
06-08-2025
- The Hindu
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The need for legislation Ever since research papers became a parameter in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), private universities have been churning out more research papers — albeit with a focus on quality. That's exactly why there are more papers and more retractions from private universities in the past ten years, as per data from Cornell University. The problem is twofold: the lack of stringent laws to curb scientific corruption and protect sleuths, and the negligence of educational institutions that foster impunity among researchers. In India, in the absence of legislation, the onus to prevent fraud is only on the institutions. However, sleuths say that most universities are mum – firing an academician over research fraud just doesn't happen in India, just as in other countries. 'As long as there is no good legislation to actually sue some of these frauds, nothing will happen. The legislation should have the norms to sue the frauds not just for the fake paper, but also for using government funding to create such a paper. It is a waste of public funding,' said John. The U.K. Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), established in 2006, is an independent charitable body that offers expert advice on research integrity and provides templates for misconduct investigations. Denmark's Act on Research Misconduct, enacted in 2017, assigns severe cases related to fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to the Danish Board on Research Misconduct for investigation. 'In India, there is a need to have an autonomous, empowered body to look into the complaints. Currently, the complaints go to the respective body governing the institute, such as the Department of Science and Technology or the University Grants Commission (UGC). They don't take these complaints seriously,' said Ms. Agarwal. India Research Watch receives around 10 messages every day from whistleblowers across the country. The nuances of cheating Every retracted paper doesn't indicate fraud; sometimes researchers identify unintentional mistakes such as calculation errors, experimental flaws, or inaccurate data analysis, and withdraw the papers themselves. With the rise of sleuths and watchdog organisations, academicians have grown savvier, learning how to cover their tracks and evade detection. 'It is very difficult to catch smart frauds – those who don't blindly use Artificial Intelligence texts and those who don't just copy-paste texts and images,' Mr. John said. 'We check for tortured phrases, image overlaps, image fakery, statistically improbable data, and methodologies in an academic paper to find out its authenticity. However, the smart frauds have evolved – they plug all these gaps to get better with fraud,' Mr. John added. As it has been established that not all universities punish researchers with retractions, the ball seems to be in the court of publishers. Publishers such as Frontiers rely on AI to check the research papers, but a statement from the publisher says there have been cases of fraud even after the deployment of AI. Frontier's Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA) was launched in 2018 and now includes over 50 verifications of submitted manuscripts. On July 29, the communications team of Frontier put out a notice that said, 'Frontier's Research Integrity Auditing team has uncovered a network of authors and editors who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest and who have engaged in citation manipulation. The unethical actions of this network have been confirmed in 122 articles published in Frontiers, across five journals, and have led to their retraction.' Beyond plagiarism Ever since the colonial era, it has been mandatory for Indian researchers to send their theses to two foreign evaluators — a practice that began when British academics were the default choice. 'Rather than sending the papers to reputed universities in countries such as Germany, Australia, or the U.S., the lower-quality ones are often sent to universities in Malaysia or Thailand,' said Prof. V. Ramachandran of Anna University. He pointed to another nuance that is common in India's academic system — a nexus between guides, students, and examiners. 'The guides propose a list of examiners to the university — a list that students are aware of. These examiners are often acquaintances of the guide or the student,' Mr. Ramachandran explained, suggesting that universities should independently constitute evaluation panels. 'The examiners must be random and unknown to the student or the guide, and they should be from well-established institutions,' he said. In private universities, academicians are often pressured to publish research papers without adequate funding support. 'At institutions such as mine, faculty are expected to begin research with just ₹1–2 lakh — and that's considered a luxury. In many private universities, researchers are made to start with zero funding,' said a professor from a private university in Tamil Nadu, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'Research output is a key metric in the NIRF rankings, and students look at these rankings while choosing colleges. It's all tied to a profit-making model,' the professor said. Besides fraud, another issue plaguing research is the rise in publications in dubious journals. 'High-standard journals follow tough peer review processes, demand original data and sound science, and are mostly read and cited by reputed researchers across the world. On the other hand, low-standard journals have become dumping grounds for unethical research. Since good scientists don't read these journals, the fraud often goes unnoticed — and most of it never even gets retracted,' the professor from VIT added. Beyond elite institutions, the crisis of research quality runs deeper in smaller universities and colleges, particularly those funded by state governments. 'In Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions — especially state universities — the drop in research quality isn't linear, it's exponential. Many are publishing in predatory venues. This is far more common in State universities, and that's where serious streamlining is needed,' said a senior academic from IISC Bangalore, seeking anonymity. 'Instead of counting papers, we should assess them on the impact of their teaching.' A long way to go Starting this year, the NIRF will begin assigning negative scores to higher educational institutions for research papers that have been retracted in the past three calendar years, along with any citations those papers had accumulated. While experts see this as a welcome step, many believe the journey toward ensuring research integrity in India remains long. 'At BITS Pilani, we are setting up a Research Integrity Office to proactively educate and sensitise our research community,' said Professor V. Ramgopal Rao, Group Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani. 'With over 500 new Ph.D. students joining us each year, we see it as our responsibility to train both faculty and students on best practices in research, responsible experimentation, and academic ethics.' Professor Rao, who has been consistently vocal on the need to tackle research fraud, has advocated for the creation of oversight mechanisms both at the institutional and national levels. 'The UGC is fundamentally a grants commission. It neither has the mandate nor the necessary structures to investigate or act on cases of research misconduct. Even if the UGC withholds funding, such activities may continue unchecked,' he observed. The Government of India has introduced a bill in Parliament to set up the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), which will serve as a single regulator replacing bodies like the UGC and AICTE. Commenting on this, Prof. Rao said, 'The proposed HECI will have the authority to impose penalties on institutions and even recommend their closure in extreme cases. However, since education is a concurrent subject under the Constitution, the Centre cannot act unilaterally. Cooperation from State governments is essential, and that makes the road to implementation long and uncertain.' Drawing a comparison with global practices, he added, 'In the U.S. and Europe, research fraud is treated with the seriousness it deserves. Academicians found guilty can lose their jobs. In India, unfortunately, we have seen cases where even vice-chancellors have been implicated in academic misconduct. When leadership itself is compromised, enforcing standards across the system becomes a much bigger challenge.' (Laasya is an Independent Journalist with bylines published in BBC, Thomson Reuters and Mongabay India among a dozen others. One day she is tracking climate finance; the next, she's decoding education reforms, dissecting caste realities or tracing wildlife in forgotten forests.)
