Fraudulent scientific research is now being produced and published on a large scale, with some unethical researchers colluding with unethical editors to attain the prestige that comes with publication, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Large groups of editors and authors appear to have cooperated in what it called “the tide of fraudulent science.”
The researchers who conducted the study obtained retracted articles. They collected reports of the same image used in multiple publications. Making use of the fact that editors’ names are public at some science publishers, they looked at whether some editors handled disproportionate numbers of problematic scientific papers, ones that were later retracted or noted negatively by other scientists.
At the journal PLOS One, they were able to identify 45 editors who worked on 30.2% of retracted articles. Of these 45 editors, 25 had their own papers retracted. The 45 editors represented 0.25% of the total number of editors at the journal. PLOS One did not respond to a request for comment.
Researchers also found clusters of articles accepted in less than a month, often involving the same editors and authors.
“They found cases where people submitted papers and those papers got accepted extremely fast, and when you looked at the editors, they were just sending them to each other,” said Luís Amaral, a systems biologist at Northwestern University and senior author of the study.
“There are people who believe that there is widespread fraud,” said Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher in the Amaral Lab at Northwestern and lead author of the study. “What this paper does is give a method and a starting point and the data to show that this is actually happening, and that the current mechanisms are not equipped to stop it.”
The study’s findings confirm the suspicions of many researchers, including Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent scientific integrity consultant who has spent years identifying fraudulent research.
In one case, she found 125 papers that reused parts of the same image. “It was the same photo, but different crops of the same image,” she said. “They didn’t generate the photos themselves. They got the photos from a third party — a broker, a paper mill.”
Researchers have been using the term “paper mill” to describe organizations that sell mass-produced low quality and fabricated research articles.
Many of these fraudulent papers, Bik added, seem to come from doctors or researchers in countries where promotions are tied to publication metrics. They see it as an investment, she explained, where a couple of thousand dollars gets them a paper, and a fast track up the promotional ladder.
This institutional pressure is especially common in China and India, where promotions, medical licensing or graduation are linked by policy to publication counts, several experts said. Although the “publish or perish” culture is also common in the U.S., it manifests more in expectations around prestige, funding and tenure, rather than fixed quotas.
India and China are the world’s most populous nations and both are scientific powerhouses. The paper notes that science fraud can happen anywhere.
The accumulation of fake literature has turned some scientific fields — RNA biology, for example — into what Richardson called an academic “minefield,” making it difficult for researchers to identify which studies are reliable. Some fraudulent studies have even made it into meta-analyses that shape the way doctors treat patients. They found evidence that this field of research has been targeted by bad actors.
Experts say growing awareness of fraud could feed broader skepticism of science, especially if institutional action doesn’t keep up.
“The more polluted the record becomes, the harder it is to clean up, and the harder it is to rebuild trust inside and outside the scientific community,” said Stephanie Kinnan, a longtime member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
The scientific community has tools to fight back. It fines and excludes researchers and universities. Journals retract articles. Aggregators can sideline problematic journals. But the authors of the paper found the amount of “research” from suspected paper mills has been doubling roughly every 1½ years. The actions are not keeping up.
For Amaral, and many other scientists, the implications are deeply personal. “I dreamed of being a scientist since I was 12,” he said. “Seeing the thing that I’ve dreamt of being a part of, that I cherish, being potentially destroyed is really enraging.”
All research is built on previous research, Amaral explained. That collapses without trust.
“This is the great fear — that the entire scientific enterprise that gave us vaccines, that gave us medicine for cancer, that gave us, X-ray machines, computer scanning devices — would just disappear,” he said.
