Opinion An epidemic of scientific fakery threatens to overwhelm publishers
More than 10,000 scientific papers were retracted last year as “paper mills” exploit the system.
By Adam Marcus
and Ivan Oransky
June 11, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
6 min
Adam Marcus, editorial director for primary care at Medscape, and Ivan Oransky, editor in chief of the Transmitter and a journalism professor at New York University, are the co-founders of Retraction Watch.
A record number of retractions — more than 10,000 scientific papers in 2023. Nineteen academic journals shut down recently after being overrun by fake research from paper mills. A single researcher with more than 200 retractions.
The numbers don’t lie: Scientific publishing has a problem, and it’s getting worse. Vigilance against fraudulent or defective research has always been necessary, but in recent years the sheer amount of suspect material has threatened to overwhelm publishers.
We were not the first to write about scientific fraud and problems in academic publishing when we launched Retraction Watch in 2010 with the aim of covering the subject regularly. Back then, coverage of such issues was episodic, and it was routine to have a year or more between major scandals worthy of national or even international attention, such as the spectacular blowup a decade ago of the Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose misdeeds (involving the implantation of artificial windpipes) resulted in a prison sentence in Europe and a Netflix docuseries.
Today, reporters jockey for scoops about scientific malfeasance that regularly grace the front pages of major news outlets around the world. In the space of a year, the presidents of Harvard and Stanford have both stepped down amid allegations of research misconduct or plagiarism, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has requested half a dozen retractions and many more corrections.
But it is not just high-profile institutions in the crosshairs. In the past few months, deans of two other universities have resigned following our coverage of allegations regarding problems in their work.
As for the epidemic of retracted papers: The 10,000-plus retractions last year were largely the result of paper mill activity overwhelming a single publisher, Hindawi, a subsidiary of Wiley. Paper mills — shadowy companies that operate in places such as China and Latvia and advertise their services on social media — sell entire papers, authorship slots or citations to a researcher’s work to inflate its seeming importance.
The total number of retractions represents about 1 in 500 published papers, up from about 1 in 5,000 two decades ago. And while many of these papers are on esoteric topics, they are undoubtedly an undercount of the amount of problematic research that exists.
So what’s happening? Is fraud on the rise? Or is something finally being done to police it?
Although only a hugely time-consuming and expensive audit of literature over the decades could determine whether fraud is indeed becoming more common, research misconduct clearly is being industrialized on an unprecedented scale.
Paper mills in particular are seizing on the opportunities that a “publish or perish” academic culture provides. Publishers have been aware of, but largely ignored, these schemes for at least a decade, but their thirst for growth and profits — around $2.2 billion last year for Elsevier alone — has led them to tolerate, and even incentivize, such activity.
Mills appear to have exploited a blind spot for major publishers: highly profitable but poorly monitored special issues, which have helped bloat the number of papers they release each year to nearly 3 million. Many of these articles — including some on truly bizarre ideas, such as linking aerobics and dance training to geology — are never cited by other researchers and possibly read by no one. (And, thanks to the rise of generative AI, an increasing percentage likely were not written by humans.)
Only recently, after more mainstream journalists took an interest in paper mills and related dubious endeavors, did Elsevier and other titans such as Springer Nature and Wiley begin acknowledging their existence, while claiming victim status instead of admitting they were complicit in creating business models and incentives that promoted such behavior. In the meantime, paper mills have been bribing journal editors to publish their clients’ work. That and other misconduct continues to plague the literature.
Thankfully, a small army of volunteer sleuths have made it their mission to alert the world to problematic papers. Such people are at risk, however, of being sued by the targets of their scrutiny when they make their findings public. And yet public scrutiny seems to be the only way to prod publishers to pay attention.
The public may believe scientific fraud and sloppiness happens because, say, Big Pharma pushes corrupt studies in their thirst for profits. Cases like that of Cassava Sciences, whose experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease has been dogged by allegations of fraudulent data, help reinforce that perception.
Meanwhile, some critics accuse scientists of bending the truth to win government grants. That seems to be a theme of angry debates over the origins of the pandemic-causing coronavirus. It’s also true that producing findings that make funders and supporters happy can be a recipe for success.
But in reality, we see far fewer retractions of papers reporting such work than we do of more purely academic studies. Research sponsored by pharmaceutical firms is closely vetted by regulators, whose scrutiny of the data tends to give would-be fakers pause. (An entirely different but no less significant issue is drug companies’ habit of burying studies that don’t reflect well on the products they’re testing.)
The much more important reason researchers cut corners and cheat is bureaucratic: rankings. University rankings such as Times Higher Education’s rely heavily on the number of citations gained by work produced by the institution’s researchers. Yet accumulating citations can be relatively easy to game. The more researchers publish, the more they can be cited — and given current business models, in which authors pay journals anywhere from hundreds of dollars to more than $10,000 to publish their papers and make them available without a subscription, the more publishers earn. When universities move up the rankings, the more top-tier students and faculty they attract — along with more funding.
Finding and flagging fraudulent work is an essential job. But it is akin to building more and more sewage treatment plants at the mouths of rivers to prevent ocean pollution. Building more “plants” is urgently needed, but so is changing the incentives — in this case, publish or perish — so that waste doesn’t get into the river far upstream.
Here are three fixes that could have far-reaching impact. First, give government agencies such as the Office of Research Integrity, which has oversight of research funded by the National Institutes of Health, more teeth and better funding. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) proposed doing that just last month. Second, the too-easily-gamed practice of counting a paper’s citations by other researchers as a metric of quality should be abandoned. Lastly, scientific journals — however painful this might be — should retire the pay-for-play business model that, by charging researchers to publish their work, has the effect of putting the veneer of legitimacy up for sale.
Science is being polluted, and science must fight back.
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