Scientific fraud is exploding, fueled by paper mills, AI, corrupt editors, and lax oversight—poisoning research integrity and forcing publishers into a high-stakes battle against a flood of fake science.
On August 4th, a paper in PNAS lit a fire under the world of science, warning that fraud in academic publishing is not creeping—it’s sprinting. Scientific journals exist to give the world accurate, peer-reviewed accounts of research. But this study shows the system is being poisoned from the inside. While the number of scientific articles doubles every 15 years, the number suspected of being fake has been doubling every 1.5 years since 2010. Luís Nunes Amaral, physicist at Northwestern University in Chicago and the study’s senior author, put it bluntly: if nothing changes, the scientific enterprise in its current form would be destroyed.
The culprits aren’t just lone wolves. This is organized
crime for the ivory tower. Paper mills—companies that churn out fake studies
with fabricated data, sometimes dressed up by artificial intelligence—are
selling authorship to academics desperate to pump up their publication lists.
Even worse, the study suggests some journal editors are rolling out the red
carpet for these fakes. Instead of guarding the gates, they’re propping them
open.
Researchers zeroed in on PLOS ONE, a huge and generally
respected journal that tracks which of its 18,329 editors handled each paper.
Since 2006, it has published 276,956 articles, 702 of which have been retracted
and 2,241 flagged on PubPeer, a site where other scientists raise red flags.
Buried in the data was a smoking gun: 45 editors, responsible for just 1.3% of
submissions, accounted for a jaw-dropping 30.2% of all retractions.
The rot went deeper. Over half of these editors had
authored papers later retracted by the same journal. When submitting their own
work, they often suggested each other as editors—passing the ball in a closed
game where the scoreboard doesn’t matter. Dr Amaral didn’t name names, but
Nature tracked down five. PLOS ONE says it fired them between 2020 and 2022.
They denied wrongdoing.
While retractions can come from honest mistakes, the
patterns looked like a playbook for bypassing peer review. And there’s
precedent—past investigations have caught paper mills bribing editors. Some
editors have also used their power to push through their own work or that of
close allies, a move as shady as a referee scoring goals in his own game.
In medicine, this fakery can be deadly. Fraudulent
studies can slip into systematic reviews that shape clinical guidelines. A BMJ
study found that 8–16% of conclusions in such reviews that relied on
later-retracted papers turned out wrong. That’s not just an academic oops—it’s
a dangerous dose of bad science in real-world decisions.
So why risk it? Because the rewards outweigh the
penalties. In academia, careers are built on how many papers you publish and
how often they’re cited. For journals, more papers mean more revenue. As Amaral
said, we have become focused on numbers. It’s publish, profit, and look
the other way.
But the noose is tightening. Databases like Scopus and
Web of Science can strip a journal of its listing if it won’t clean up. That’s
academic exile—no prestige, no credibility. To get back in, publishers must
scrub out untrustworthy papers. As Web of Science’s editor-in-chief put it, if
we see untrustworthy content that you’re not retracting, you’re not getting
back in.
The message is clear: fraud is no longer a trickle—it’s a
flood. Paper mills are pumping, AI is dressing the lies, corrupt editors are
signing off, and lax oversight is letting it all slip through. The fight to
save research integrity is a race against a counterfeit conveyor belt that’s
running faster every year. If the keepers of science can’t dam the flow, the
flood will carry away the trust that keeps the whole enterprise afloat.
No comments:
Post a Comment