Thousands of fake papers are churned out by so-called paper mills and published every year, many of them in peer-reviewed journals. The issue made headlines recently when Wiley, a respected publishing house, announced it would be dropping 19 of its journals associated with a publisher they had acquired, called Hindawi, in part because they were infested with fake papers. But the problem was known before: The fraud sleuthing blog For Better Science called attention to the “fraud-positive” attitude at Wiley back in 2022.
These aren’t just papers with fudged data – in many cases, all the data and the text have been invented from whole cloth, generated with artificial intelligence, or plagiarized. They’re fake all the way through. Paper mills have proliferated because of a pathology that’s afflicted many areas of science. Scientists are rewarded for the quantity of their research more than its quality. And peer review is non-functional at many journals.
For enough money, the paper mills can make a fake paper look more influential by creating other fake papers that cite it, he said. The paper mill studies can even get cited in seemingly legitimate review papers if the review authors – who are also trying for volume – don’t pay sufficient attention to what they’re reviewing. With the help of ChatGPT, paper mills can create much more coherent, plausible papers cheaply and effortlessly.
Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch, has been tracking problematic research for years. He said that paper mill output has been estimated to make up about 2% of papers. That may not sound big, but somewhere between 2 million and 6 million scientific papers are published every year, so 2% adds up to a lot.
