A major scientific publisher, Taylor & Francis, said yesterday it has paused submissions to its journal Bioengineered so editors there can investigate some 1000 of its papers that bear signs they contain manipulated results or came from shady enterprises known as paper mills. As many journals grapple with how to effectively police a recent surge in articles from such profit-driven businesses, calling a full timeout to clean up the mess is a rare move, applauded by the research integrity sleuth who independently flagged the warning signs.
“Today feels like a big win for the scientific record,” says Reńe Aquarius, a biomedical scientist in Radboud University Medical Centre’s neurosurgery department. Aquarius led a group of sleuths who published a preprint in March suggesting the journal was rife with problematic papers and that Taylor & Francis was not acting fast enough to investigate them. That was after the publisher said in 2023 that Bioengineered’s editorial integrity had been compromised in 2021 and 2022, but the journal had since “overcome the paper mill activity.”
Paper mills are companies that sell manuscripts, which buyers can submit to journals, that contain fabricated or manipulated results. In some cases, the firms broker the listing of authors who pay to be included on an article—some legitimate, others not—even though that person contributed nothing to the content. Out of a sample of nearly 900 papers Bioengineered published from 2010 through 2023, one-quarter showed signs of image manipulation or duplication, Aquarius’ preprint reported. Only 35 had been retracted. The total number of published papers also increased 10-fold in 2021, to more than 1000 papers that year—a warning sign of paper mill activity. (The journal’s open-access business model, which charges authors or their institutions to publish, creates an incentive to accept more submissions, but Bioengineered’s annual publication rate has since subsided.) In 2023, the journal had an impact factor of 4.2, which put it in the second quartile among journals in its field.
