Paper mills: the 'cartel-like' companies behind fraudulent scientific journals
Paper mills are producing fraudulent research papers for fees, leading to a surge in article retractions. Their tactics include plagiarism and bribery, significantly impacting academic integrity and costing millions.
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Fraudulent scientific journals are increasingly being infiltrated by "paper mills," companies that produce fake research papers for a fee, compromising the integrity of academic research. These companies offer authorship services to researchers, allowing them to pay between €180 and €5000 to have their names listed as authors without conducting any actual research. A significant rise in retractions of fraudulent articles has been noted, with numbers jumping from 10 in 2019 to 2,099 in 2023. Major publishers like Hindawi and Wiley have retracted thousands of articles linked to these mills. Paper mills often operate in countries with research policies that incentivize high publication rates, such as China and India, but their clientele spans globally. They employ tactics such as plagiarizing existing work, using AI tools for article generation, and offering fake peer reviews. The operations of these mills can resemble cartel-like behavior, with some editors reportedly bribed to facilitate publication. The financial implications are substantial, with estimates suggesting the industry has generated around $10 million globally, impacting public funding for research. Despite efforts from organizations to combat this issue, the prevalence of paper mill articles remains a significant challenge for the academic community.
- Paper mills produce fraudulent research papers for a fee, undermining academic integrity.
- The number of retractions due to paper mills has dramatically increased in recent years.
- These companies often operate in countries with policies encouraging high publication rates.
- Tactics include plagiarism, AI-generated content, and bribing journal editors.
- The financial impact of paper mills is significant, costing the academic community millions.
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11 comments1. Who is this for? My program doesn't have a publication requirement, but it's sort of an implicit expectation and it helps to definitively answer the question of whether I've made substantial contributions to my field (so it takes some pressure off of my committee in deciding whether I should graduate). So, yeah, I need publications. But my advisor and committee members know full-well what I'm working on. I can't just point to three random papers with my name on them (along with the names of other people they don't know) about things like "the activity of ground beetles attacking crops in Kazakhstan." That would demand a lot of... explanation. My advisor who will be up for tenure next year also needs publications, but again, how would this help him?
2. Nevermind outright fraud; during my literature review I've come across a number of astonishingly crappy papers in what appear to be legitimate journals and conference proceedings, bearing the names of reputable organizations like the IEEE. I'm talking about stuff that's almost totally unintelligible, like it was written by a bot in, say, Chinese and then run through machine translation into English without any human editing it (back before bots and machine translation got much better with LLMs). On one hand, I look at what gets accepted into the top-tier conferences and journals and I feel like I can't possibly compete; like I'm a raw amateur baseball player batting against MLB pitchers. But then I see some of what gets into these lower-tier venues that I've previously never heard of, and I'm like, "Ok, I can do much better than this!"
There are multiple paths as far garbage papers, like not reading what is cited, LLM generated content, data falsification, buying a spot on a paper like this article describes, and so on.
Authors produce garbage papers. Peer reviewers do not review. Journals demand large amounts of monies to publish and read. Researchers do not read, therefore cite garbage papers. This results in wrong results, authoring garbage papers. Rinse, repeat.
I do not know how to fix this, considering the vast amount of garbage papers already published. How do we filter them out?
Billion dollar pot calling the small fry kettle black. Scientific publishing used to be like this (and may still be in some fields) and this state of affairs didn’t come into being by accident: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
Yes, that Robert Maxwell. Israeli[0] arch-spook. Father of Ghislaine and other spooked up kids.
[0]: Fair to call them his primary customers but he’s had others.
Perhaps. But thanks to MDPI and Hindawi the guarantee is implicitly there (as long as the APC is paid) with most institutions being fine considering the publications made in one of their journals in one's CV.
That's quite a bargain compared to "reputable" publishers who take similar amounts to do not much more than holding a paywall.
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