Science is Dead, Long Live Science

AI view of a scientist
if only

Leslie Eastman at LI, Paper Mills, Sham Journals, and Stolen Reputation: Fraud and Greed are Poisoning Science

A major study published by Northwestern University this August, entitled “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly,” revealed that organized science fraud networks are extensive, resilient, and growing rapidly. The investigation analyzed retracted publications, image manipulation, and metadata across databases such as PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, revealing coordinated global efforts to flood the literature with fake research.

The scale of the problem is staggering and is perhaps the biggest crisis facing real science today.

By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.

The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors argue these findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community, which needs to act before the public loses confidence in the scientific process.

 

The authors investigated how systematic publication manipulation (especially involving organized entities like paper mills and brokers) represents a mounting threat to scientific integrity.

The findings were astonishing. The analysis demonstrated that there are large, interconnected networks of authors and editors collaborating across multiple journals to facilitate falsified activity, often evading detection and interventions such as retractions or journal de-indexing (in which an academic journal is removed from a bibliographic database). Fraudsters strategically target specific journals and subfields that are vulnerable to exploitation. Their operations rapidly adapt by “journal hopping,” whereby they switch to new journals when the old ones are deindexed or scrutinized.

The authors go into detail about the disturbing developments surrounding “paper mills”, designed to give paying contributors scientific prestige that is not earned through actual research and original analysis.

Cheating is inevitable when the rewards for cheating are high, the probability of being caught and and the potential penalty is small. There's not too much you can do about the rewards, nor would you want to, but it would be possible to dramatically increase the possibility of being detected (AI might prove useful), and work making the consequences of being caught more severe. 

The Wombat has posted Rule 5 Sunday: Karin Hart at the usual time and place.