Latest news with #RetractionWatch
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Bogus scientific papers are enriching fraudsters and slowing lifesaving medical research
Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many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. Even when bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews and other research and discusses findings. These fake papers are slowing research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies, from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts' data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard-hit, while areas such as philosophy and art are less affected. To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we – a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France's Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills. Co-author Guillaume Cabanac also developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors. Problematic Paper Screener: Trawling for fraud in the scientific literature Frank Cackowski at Detroit's Wayne State University was confused. The oncologist was studying a sequence of chemical reactions in cells to see whether they could be a target for drugs against prostate cancer. A paper from 2018 in the American Journal of Cancer Research piqued his interest when he read that a little-known molecule called SNHG1 might interact with the chemical reactions he was exploring. He and fellow Wayne State researcher Steven Zielske began experiments but found no link. Meanwhile, Zielske had grown suspicious of the paper. Two graphs showing results for different cell lines were identical, he noticed, which 'would be like pouring water into two glasses with your eyes closed and the levels coming out exactly the same.' Another graph and a table in the article also inexplicably contained identical data. Zielske described his misgivings in an anonymous post in 2020 at PubPeer, an online forum where many scientists report potential research misconduct, and also contacted the journal's editor. The journal pulled the paper, citing 'falsified materials and/or data.' 'Science is hard enough as it is if people are actually being genuine and trying to do real work,' said Cackowski, who also works at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan. Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before publication by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. But this peer review process is far from perfect. Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don't look for fraud. Some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees. Worse, some corrupt scientists form peer review rings. Paper mills may create fake peer reviewers. Others may bribe editors or plant agents on journal editorial boards. It's unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest suspected paper mill article retracted was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch database, which details retractions and is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch. An analysis of 53,000 papers submitted to six publishers – but not necessarily published – found 2% to 46% suspect submissions across journals. The American publisher Wiley, which has retracted more than 11,300 articles and closed 19 heavily affected journals in its erstwhile Hindawi division, said its new paper mill detection tool flags up to 1 in 7 submissions. As many as 2% of the several million scientific works published in 2022 were milled, according to Adam Day, who directs Clear Skies, a company in London that develops tools to spot fake papers. Some fields are worse than others: biology and medicine are closer to 3%, and some subfields, such as cancer, may be much larger, Day said. The paper mill problem is 'absolutely huge,' said Sabina Alam, director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher. In 2019, none of the 175 ethics cases escalated to her team was about paper mills, Alam said. Ethics cases include submissions and already published papers. 'We had almost 4,000 cases' in 2023, she said. 'And half of those were paper mills.' Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, testified at a July 2022 U.S. House of Representatives hearing that 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 genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of fake papers. In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists' work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97% of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected. The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud. Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies' Papermill Alarm. But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won't be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains. Today's commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. 'Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,' she said. There's a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: 'We pay them for accepting papers,' said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said. To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. 'We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,' he said. Peer review, meanwhile, 'should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,' Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse Read more: Problematic Paper Screener: Trawling for fraud in the scientific literature Fake papers are contaminating the world's scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research Brad Pitt online romance fraud shows how victims are influenced by complex psychological factors Labbé receives funding from the European Research Council. He has also received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR), and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. Labbé has been in touch with most of the major publishers and their integrity officers, offering pro-bono consulting regarding detection tools to various actors in the field including STM-Hub and Morressier. Cabanac receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He is the administrator of the Problematic Paper Screener, a public platform that uses metadata from Digital Science and PubPeer via no-cost agreements. Cabanac has been in touch with most of the major publishers and their integrity officers, offering pro bono consulting regarding detection tools to various actors in the field including ClearSkies, Morressier, River Valley, Signals, and STM. Frederik Joelving does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Gulf Insider
21-02-2025
- Health
- Gulf Insider
500+ COVID Studies Retracted for Unreliable Data
Retractions are driven by pressure to produce studies quickly, watchdog co-founder says More than 500 studies on COVID-19 have been withdrawn due to 'bias,' 'unreliable' information, or unspecified reasons, a blog that tracks retracted documents, found. Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky told The College Fix via phone interview one reason for the high number of retractions is the academic system's incentive structure which pressures researchers to rapidly produce studies and get them peer reviewed as quickly as possible. 'Why do they feel the need to rush papers through? Well, it's because that's how they get or keep their jobs, that's how they get grants, everything is based on that,' he said. 'When you know that your whole career depends on publishing papers in particular journals, you're going to do what you have to do to publish those papers. Most of the time that means you work hard, you hire the smart grad students and postdocs,' he said. Oransky also said researchers may feel 'too desperate' or that 'incentives are so stark' that there's no 'humanly possible way' to do it. 'So you start engaging in misconduct,' he said. The articles in the list pertain to risk factors related to COVID-19 vaccines and various alternative treatments for the disease. 'It's really a range of everything from essays to big clinical trials,' he said. Oransky pointed The Fix to one of his research letters examining the differences between retractions of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 related research papers. The results showed that papers on COVID-19 had a higher likelihood of being retracted or withdrawn within the first six months of publication and that they were more likely removed 'without detailed explanation or for non-misconduct-related concerns.' He said retracting papers is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can correct information that was potentially wrong or misleading. Ensuring clear and concise reasoning for retractions is crucial, he told The Fix . 'The problem is when papers aren't retracted. The problem is when papers sit in the literature, people know there's a problem, but everybody refuses to do anything about them,' Oransky said. Further, many people use retractions to argue the government, drug companies, and others are untrustworthy. Generally, those people either 'have an axe to grind' or are 'just trying to sell the public something,' he said. A retraction simply says the information 'is unreliable.' 'It doesn't remove it from the world,' he said. However, the transparency of the process varies. Some retraction notices provide no explanation, while others include detailed reasons for the retraction. One of the retracted papers in the list, which question why children are being vaccinated against COVID-19, was withdrawn due to 'unreliable' findings stemming from 'inappropriate bias,' according to the retraction notice. Another paper on COVID-19 vaccination risks was completely withdrawn without any explanation. Oransky told The Fix that full withdrawals are not considered best practice. In other instances, retractions occurred because the author or editor sought further information they wanted to include or because of a technical error that occurred during the study that affected the results. The College Fix reached out to the publisher of the COVID vaccination risk study, Elsevier , seeking an answer as to why the paper was removed without an explanation. The publisher said because the article was published in 2020, it wouldn't be able to determine why it was withdrawn within a reasonable amount of time. Click here to read more Also read: Trump Could Be About To Ban COVID Vaccines; Report
Atlantic
13-02-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
The Scientific Literature Can't Save Us Now
Twice during his Senate confirmation hearings at the end of January, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought up a peer-reviewed study by a certain 'Mawson' that had come out just the week before. 'That article is by Mawson,' he said to Senator Bill Cassidy, then spelled out the author's name for emphasis: 'M-A-W-S-O-N.' And to Bernie Sanders: 'Look at the Mawson study, Senator. … Mawson. Just look at that study.' 'Mawson' is Anthony Mawson, an epidemiologist and former academic who has published several papers alleging a connection between childhood vaccines and autism. (Any such connection has been thoroughly debunked.) His latest on the subject, and the one to which Kennedy was referring appeared in a journal that is not indexed by the National Library of Medicine, or by any other organization that might provide it with some scientific credibility. One leading member of the journal's editorial board, a stubborn advocate for using hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID-19, has lost five papers to retraction. Another member is Didier Raoult (whose name the journal has misspelled), a presence on the Retraction Watch leaderboard, which is derived from the work of a nonprofit we cofounded, with 31 retractions. A third, and the journal's editor in chief, is James Lyons-Weiler, who has one retraction of his own and has called himself, in a since deleted post on X, a friend and 'close adviser to Bobby Kennedy.' (Mawson told us he chose this journal because several mainstream ones had rejected his manuscript without review. Lyons-Weiler did not respond to a request for comment.) Perhaps a scientist or politician—and certainly a citizen-activist who hopes to be the nation's leading health-policy official—should be wary of citing anything from this researcher or this journal to support a claim. The fact that one can do so anyway in a setting of the highest stakes, while stating truthfully that the work originated in a peer-reviewed, academic publication, reveals an awkward fact: The scientific literature is an essential ocean of knowledge, in which floats an alarming amount of junk. Think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but the trash cannot be identified without special knowledge and equipment. And while this problem is long-standing, until the past decade or so, no one with both the necessary expertise and the power to intervene has been inclined to help. With the Trump administration taking control of the CDC and other posts on the nation's science bulwark, the consequences are getting worse. As RFK Jr. made plain during his confirmation hearing, the advocates or foes of virtually any claim can point to published work and say, 'See? Science!' This state of affairs is not terribly surprising when one considers how many studies labeled as 'peer reviewed' appear every year: at least 3 million. The system of scientific publishing is, as others have noted, under severe strain. Junk papers proliferate at vanity journals and legitimate ones alike, due in part to the 'publish or perish' ethos that pervades the research enterprise, and in part to the catastrophic business model that has captured much of scientific publishing since the early 2000s. That model—based on a well-meaning attempt to free scientific findings from subscription paywalls—relies on what are known as article-processing charges: fees researchers pay to publishers. The charges aren't inconsequential, sometimes running into the low five figures. And the more papers that journals publish, the more money they bring in. Researchers are solicited to feed the beast with an ever-increasing number of manuscripts, while publishers have reason to create new journals that may end up serving as a destination for lower-quality work. The result: Far too many papers appear each year in too many journals without adequate peer review or even editing. The mess that this creates, in the form of unreliable research, can to some extent be cleaned up after publication. Indeed, the retraction rate in science—meaning the frequency with which a journal says, for one reason or another, 'Don't rely on this paper'—has been growing rapidly. It's going up even faster than the rate of publication, having increased roughly tenfold over the past decade. That may sound like editors are weeding out the literature more aggressively as it expands. And the news is in some ways good—but even now, far more papers should be retracted than are retracted. No one likes to admit an error—not scientists, not publishers, not universities, not funders. Profit motive can sometimes trump quality control even at the world's largest publishers, which earn billions annually. It also fuels a ravenous pack of 'paper mills' that publish scientific work with barely any standards whatsoever, including those that might be used to screen out AI-generated scientific slop. An empiricist might say that the sum total of these articles simply adds to human knowledge. If only. Many, or even most, published papers serve no purpose whatsoever. They simply appear and … that's it. No one ever cites them in subsequent work; they leave virtually no trace of their existence. Until, of course, someone convinces a gullible public—or a U.S. senator—that all research currency, new and old, is created equal. Want to make the case that childhood vaccines cause autism? Find a paper in a journal that says as much and, more important, ignore the countless other articles discrediting the same idea. Consumers are already all too familiar with this strategy: News outlets use the same tactic when they tell you that chocolate, coffee, and red wine are good for you one week—but will kill you the next. Scientists are not immune from picking and choosing, either. They may, for example, assert that there is no evidence for a claim even though such evidence exists—a practice that has been termed ' dismissive citation.' Or they may cite retracted papers, either because they didn't bother checking on those papers' status or because that status was unclear. (Our team built and shared the Retraction Watch Database —recently acquired by another nonprofit—to help address the latter problem.) The pharmaceutical industry can also play the science-publication system to its advantage. Today, reviewers at the FDA rely on raw data for their drug approvals, not the questionable thumbs-up of journals' peer review. But if the agency, flawed as it may be, has its power or its workforce curbed, the scientific literature (with even greater flaws) is not prepared to fill the gap. Kennedy has endorsed at least one idea that could help to solve these many problems. At his confirmation hearing, he suggested that scientific papers should be published alongside their peer reviews. (By convention, these appraisals are kept both anonymous and secret.) A few publishers have already taken this step, and while only time will tell if it succeeds, the practice does appear to blunt the argument that too much scientific work is hashed out behind closed doors. If such a policy were applied across the literature, we might all be better off. Regardless, publishers must be more honest about their limitations, and the fact that many of their papers are unreliable. If they did their part to clean up the literature by retracting more unworthy papers, even better. Opening up science at various stages to more aggressive scrutiny—' red teaming,' if you will—would also help. Any such reforms will be slow-moving, though, and America is foundering right now in a whirlpool of contested facts. The scientific literature is not equipped to bail us out.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Bogus scientific papers are enriching fraudsters and slowing lifesaving medical research
Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 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. Even when bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews and other research and discusses findings. These fake papers are slowing research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies, from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts' data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard-hit, while areas such as philosophy and art are less affected. To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we – a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France's Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills. Co-author Guillaume Cabanac also developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors. Frank Cackowski at Detroit's Wayne State University was confused. The oncologist was studying a sequence of chemical reactions in cells to see whether they could be a target for drugs against prostate cancer. A paper from 2018 in the American Journal of Cancer Research piqued his interest when he read that a little-known molecule called SNHG1 might interact with the chemical reactions he was exploring. He and fellow Wayne State researcher Steven Zielske began experiments but found no link. Meanwhile, Zielske had grown suspicious of the paper. Two graphs showing results for different cell lines were identical, he noticed, which 'would be like pouring water into two glasses with your eyes closed and the levels coming out exactly the same.' Another graph and a table in the article also inexplicably contained identical data. Zielske described his misgivings in an anonymous post in 2020 at PubPeer, an online forum where many scientists report potential research misconduct, and also contacted the journal's editor. The journal pulled the paper, citing 'falsified materials and/or data.' 'Science is hard enough as it is if people are actually being genuine and trying to do real work,' said Cackowski, who also works at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan. Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before publication by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. But this peer review process is far from perfect. Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don't look for fraud. Some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees. Worse, some corrupt scientists form peer review rings. Paper mills may create fake peer reviewers. Others may bribe editors or plant agents on journal editorial boards. It's unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest suspected paper mill article retracted was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch database, which details retractions and is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch. An analysis of 53,000 papers submitted to six publishers – but not necessarily published – found 2% to 46% suspect submissions across journals. The American publisher Wiley, which has retracted more than 11,300 articles and closed 19 heavily affected journals in its erstwhile Hindawi division, said its new paper mill detection tool flags up to 1 in 7 submissions. As many as 2% of the several million scientific works published in 2022 were milled, according to Adam Day, who directs Clear Skies, a company in London that develops tools to spot fake papers. Some fields are worse than others: biology and medicine are closer to 3%, and some subfields, such as cancer, may be much larger, Day said. The paper mill problem is 'absolutely huge,' said Sabina Alam, director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher. In 2019, none of the 175 ethics cases escalated to her team was about paper mills, Alam said. Ethics cases include submissions and already published papers. 'We had almost 4,000 cases' in 2023, she said. 'And half of those were paper mills.' Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, testified at a July 2022 U.S. House of Representatives hearing that 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 genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of fake papers. In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists' work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97% of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected. The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud. Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies' Papermill Alarm. But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won't be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains. Today's commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. 'Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,' she said. There's a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: 'We pay them for accepting papers,' said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said. To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. 'We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,' he said. Peer review, meanwhile, 'should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,' Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse Read more: Problematic Paper Screener: Trawling for fraud in the scientific literature Fake papers are contaminating the world's scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research Brad Pitt online romance fraud shows how victims are influenced by complex psychological factors Labbé receives funding from the European Research Council. He has also received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR), and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. Labbé has been in touch with most of the major publishers and their integrity officers, offering pro-bono consulting regarding detection tools to various actors in the field including STM-Hub and Morressier. Cabanac receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He is the administrator of the Problematic Paper Screener, a public platform that uses metadata from Digital Science and PubPeer via no-cost agreements. Cabanac has been in touch with most of the major publishers and their integrity officers, offering pro bono consulting regarding detection tools to various actors in the field including ClearSkies, Morressier, River Valley, Signals, and STM. Frederik Joelving does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
