Latest news with #CenterforScientificIntegrity
Observer
06-08-2025
- Science
- Observer
Fraudulent scientific papers are rapidly increasing
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.
Politico
25-06-2025
- Health
- Politico
Meet science's new fraud fighter
INVESTIGATION A new scientific integrity project aims to find 'bad medical evidence before it kills people.' Or at least that's how James Heathers describes his new role, as director of the Medical Evidence Project, on LinkedIn. The nascent project is predicated on the belief that uncovering flawed research is a slow and arduous process with few enforcement mechanisms. And allowing bad research to go unchecked can have high stakes. If flimsy or incorrect studies are incorporated into health or medical treatment guidelines, they can cause widespread public health harms. The Medical Evidence Project will operate on two levels: Whistleblowers can use a tip line to alert Heathers' team to problematic research and the team will build digital infrastructure to vet research more efficiently. The project is funded through a two-year $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy. The nonprofit Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent organization of Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks retractions in scientific publications, is running the initiative. Heathers, a Boston-based research scientist leading the project, talked with Erin about the project's launch earlier this month and why correcting the record matters: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How will you choose which research tips to pursue? I triage things in terms of: What is it supposed to prevent? What harm could be caused? What actually happens? Let's say we were talking about vitamin K or another necessary supplementation to support healthy birth. That's really important. Is everyone eating enough salmon? Significantly less important. If there are things that are inaccurate, obviously that's a problem. But if there are things that are inaccurate that are going to hurt people and the research is provably inaccurate, then I have officially become very interested, which is often a process that people who are less than honest do not enjoy. If you identify research that's inaccurate and harmful, what happens next? It depends on the nature of the inaccuracy. Let's say there were two studies in the same meta-analysis, and one was heavily plagiarized from the other, and it was fake, but it was being counted twice in a meta-analysis. Let's also say that the outcome of that was particularly harmful. I have no interest in an 18-month process where they will eventually conclude that there was a problem if people are going to get hurt in the meantime. Those things, frankly, go straight to press. The proper channels are unfit for purpose when it comes to things that hurt people. If we find a paper that's mathematically impossible, we don't need to have a conversation about whether or not they meant it, or what was in their heart when the paper was made wrong. I don't really care. What I care about is the consequences of it being wrong. Something like that we would pursue immediately — in public. If it's something more complicated, more abstract, bigger, less threatening, then I will probably have to take that to journals, universities, maybe scientific societies and try to get clarity on elements of what's happening. Does pursuing action in public mean putting out reports or press releases? Calling The New York Times? It could very well be all of those. Because we're a kind of sister organization of Retraction Watch, some of it will likely go straight to Retraction Watch. I'll look for larger or more prominent outlets based on the seriousness of what's found. This is global, so if we have a problem that's within, let's say the Canadian gastroenterology guidelines, it's much better published in Toronto than it is in Sydney or Dubai or Singapore or New York. It's an interesting time to launch a project on scientific integrity. Trust in the medical research enterprise is low right now in the U.S. People have been very critical of the regulatory system here, but it's infinitely better than it is in a lot of other places. Historically, approval here carries a collective of weight internationally. This country has an excellent, developed medical research infrastructure. It's also 4 percent of the whole world. So the other 96 percent have got what they've got, and usually it's not as good as the FDA. For all its vagaries and oversights, I promise you, the rest of the world exists, and a lot of the time it's playing catch-up to Uncle Sam. Is there anything else readers should know about the project? I'll definitely take tips. It's very straightforward. It's tips@ WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. While President Donald Trump and Republicans seek to turn the screws on elite liberal universities with their megabill, a conservative Christian liberal arts college has managed to secure a carveout, POLITICO's Caitlin Oprysko reports. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Danny Nguyen at dnguyen@ Carmen Paun at cpaun@ Ruth Reader at rreader@ or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@ Want to share a tip securely? Message us on Signal: Dannyn516.70, CarmenP.82, RuthReader.02 or ErinSchumaker.01. WASHINGTON WATCH HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered perhaps his most extensive statement on his department's stance on psychedelic research during a House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing Tuesday. When Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) — who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan and co-authored an amendment that passed in the 2024 spending bill to fund psychedelics trials for active-duty service members with PTSD — asked how he planned to accelerate psychedelic research and clinical trial access, Kennedy didn't hesitate. He pointed to the 11 ongoing psychedelics clinical trials at the Department of Veterans Affairs and promised to launch trials at the Food and Drug Administration. 'We've brought on personnel to liaison directly with the VA. I talk with [VA Secretary] Doug Collins about it all the time. It's something that both of us are deeply interested in,' Kennedy said. 'Particularly for our retired service members, it's critically important that we make sure that the science on this is solid,' he said, adding, 'The preliminary results are very, very encouraging, and it's something that we want to pursue.' Big picture: Psychedelics advocates have been trying to predict where the Trump administration stands on psychedelic medicine. Last summer, at the end of the Biden administration, the psychedelics industry suffered a setback when the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics' application for MDMA, also known as ecstasy, combined with talk therapy as a PTSD treatment, on the grounds that the regimen was not proven to be safe or effective. What's next: On Tuesday, Kennedy appeared willing to revisit that decision. 'These are people who badly need some kind of therapy. Nothing else is working for them,' Kennedy told Crenshaw. '[FDA Commissioner] Marty Makary has told me that we don't want to wait two years to get this done,' he added. 'This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting, and we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.'
