Research paper mill

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In research, a paper mill is a business that publishes poor or fake journal papers that seem to resemble genuine research, as well as sells authorship. [1] [2]

Contents

In some cases, paper mills are sophisticated operations that sell authorship positions on legitimate research, but in many cases the papers contain fraudulent data and can be heavily plagiarized or otherwise unprofessional. [3] [4] According to a report from Nature , thousands of papers in academic journals have been traced to paper mills from China, Iran and Russia, and some journals are revamping their review processes." [3] Chinese researchers have been identified as particularly prevalent customers of paper mill services. [5] Differing estimates put the share of paper mill productions between 2% and 20% of published academic papers, with particularly severe problems in some areas of biomedicine. [2] [5] [6]

It is a problem of research ethics and research integrity affecting academic publishing (academic writing, scientific writing and medical writing). It is an instance of academic dishonesty involving contract cheating and authorship, more specifically academic ghostwriting or medical ghostwriter. It may include data fabrication, leading to junk science, and sometimes to retractions in the scientific literature (scientific journals, academic journals, or medical journals).

Examples

Depiction of a coordinated publishing ring associated with paper mill International Publisher Ltd. Figure 4 from Abalkina (2022). AnnaAbalkina Fig4MDPI.png
Depiction of a coordinated publishing ring associated with paper mill International Publisher Ltd. Figure 4 from Abalkina (2022).

In early 2022, Times Higher Education and the Science Magazine News department covered a report exposing a Russian paper mill company International Publisher Ltd. [4] [8] The report identified hundreds of published academic papers where positions for authorship had been sold through a Russian website allowing researchers to pay for academic prestige without requiring legitimate research contributions. [7] [9] During the three-year period analyzed, 419 articles were identified that were matched to manuscripts later published in many different academic journals, with a significant bias towards publications in predatory journals. [7] While the paper mill targeted various journals, almost 100 papers were published in International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (Kassel University Press) alone, seemingly coordinated through the involvement of journal editors hosting Special Issues with space for coauthors auctioned off for anywhere from $180–5000 USD. In a separate network, guest editors and salaried academic editors for MDPI were found to coordinate sale of authorship across four different MDPI journals, totalling over 20 papers (picture, right). [7] Beyond collusion between editors and International Publisher Ltd., many legitimate research papers also sold authorship unknown to the journal editors, and were ultimately accepted in journals published by Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley-Blackwell. As of April 6, 2022, many of these publishers have opened an investigation into the matter. [4]

In May 2024, the Wall Street Journal published a report on fake studies that affected New Jersey publisher Wiley. More that 11,300 papers were retracted, and 19 journals were reportedly closed. The problematic papers were linked to Hindawi, an Egyptian publisher of about 250 scientific journals that Wiley acquired in 2021. [10] [11] The article detailed how the research paper mill fraud worked, and highlighted individual efforts to identify and prevent future fraud. The article also warned that artificial intelligence was going to make fraud more difficult to detect. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

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Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. It is violation of scientific integrity: violation of the scientific method and of research ethics in science, including in the design, conduct, and reporting of research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific literature</span> Literary genre

Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research and theoretical contributions. These papers serve as essential sources of knowledge and are commonly referred to simply as "the literature" within specific research fields.

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley, is an American multinational publishing company that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company was founded in 1807 and produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in print and electronically, as well as online products and services, training materials, and educational materials for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students.

In academic publishing, a retraction is a mechanism by which a published paper in an academic journal is flagged for being seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but marked as retracted. In some cases it may be necessary to remove an article from publication, such as when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public.

SCIgen is a paper generator that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. Its original data source was a collection of computer science papers downloaded from CiteSeer. All elements of the papers are formed, including graphs, diagrams, and citations. Created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, its stated aim is "to maximize amusement, rather than coherence." Originally created in 2005 to expose the lack of scrutiny of submissions to conferences, the generator subsequently became used, primarily by Chinese academics, to create large numbers of fraudulent conference submissions, leading to the retraction of 122 SCIgen generated papers and the creation of detection software to combat its use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiley-Blackwell</span> Journal publishing business of John Wiley & Sons

Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing in 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hindawi (publisher)</span> Scientific and medical journal publisher

Hindawi was a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company.

Academic authorship of journal articles, books, and other original works is a means by which academics communicate the results of their scholarly work, establish priority for their discoveries, and build their reputation among their peers. Through authorship, researchers, assistants, interns, students, and other involved parties receive credit for their contributions and can be held responsible and accountable for the quality and integrity of the work.

MDPI is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.

The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology or WASET is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. The publisher has been listed as a "potential, possible, or probable" predatory publisher by American library scientist Jeffrey Beall and is listed as such by the Max Planck Society and Stop Predatory Journals. WASET's estimated annual revenue in 2017 alone was over $4 million, with other estimates ranging from $8.9 million to $11.9 million for the years 2014 to 2019 combined.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association</span> Industry association in scholarly publishing

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMICS Publishing Group</span> Discredited academic publishing company

OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, International Online Medical Council (IOMC), Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Prime Scholars, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.

Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer-review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Who's Afraid of Peer Review?</span> 2013 article by John Bohannon

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.

Journal hijacking refers to the brandjacking of a legitimate academic journal by a malicious third party. Typically, the imposter journal sets up a fraudulent website for the purpose of offering scholars the opportunity to rapidly publish their research online for a fee. The term hijacked journal may refer to either the fraud or the legitimate journal. The fraudulent journals are also known as "clone journals". Similar hijacking can occur with academic conferences.

Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, the topics covered can diverge substantially from what has been advertised, and advertising can include claims of involvement of prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved. They are an expansion of the predatory publishing business model, which involves the creation of academic publications built around an exploitative business model that generally involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.

International Publisher Ltd. is an academic paper mill company that coordinates the sale of fake authorships on research papers for publication in an academic journal. The company is headquartered in Moscow (Russia) with offices in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Iran, and lists its chief editor as Ksenia Badziun. Its website has existed since 2018.

Anna Abalkina is a Russian academic, and is a research fellow at the Free University of Berlin. Abalkina researches scientific corruption and fraud, including paper mills and hijacked journals. She was named by the journal Nature as one of ten people who shaped science in 2024.

References

  1. ↑ "Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via paper mills: Forum discussion topic September 2020". Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Retrieved 2021-03-30.
  2. 1 2 Sanderson, Katharine (2024-01-19). "Science's fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper mills". Nature. 626 (7997): 17–18. Bibcode:2024Natur.626...17S. doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00159-9. PMID   38243120.
  3. 1 2 Else, Holly; Van Noorden, Richard (2021-03-23). "The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science". Nature. 591 (7851): 516–519. Bibcode:2021Natur.591..516E. doi: 10.1038/d41586-021-00733-5 . PMID   33758408.
  4. 1 2 3 Chawla, Dalmeet (2022-04-06). "Russian site peddles paper authorship in reputable journals for up to $5000 a pop". www.science.org. Retrieved 2022-04-12.
  5. 1 2 "China's fake science industry: how 'paper mills' threaten progress". www.ft.com. 2023.
  6. ↑ "Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common". Science. 2023-05-09.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Abalkina, Anna (October 2023). "Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: evidence from a Russia-based paper mill". Learned Publishing. 36 (4): 689–702. arXiv: 2112.13322 . doi: 10.1002/leap.1574 .
  8. ↑ "Academic fraud factories are booming, warns plagiarism sleuth". Times Higher Education (THE). 2022-01-19. Retrieved 2023-03-15.
  9. ↑ "Publication and Collaboration Anomalies in Academic Papers Originating From a Russian-Based Paper Mill". Peer Review Congress. Retrieved 2023-03-15.
  10. 1 2 Subbaraman, Nidhi (May 15, 2024). "Exclusive | Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures". Wall Street Journal . Retrieved May 15, 2024.
  11. ↑ "Wiley Announces the Acquisition of Hindawi". Wiley.com. January 5, 2021. Retrieved May 24, 2024.
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