Faking it until you make it may be a common practice in some careers. But it’s clearly unethical for scientists and medical researchers. All the same 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. (And I covered the problem of fake research on my Follow the Science podcast back in 2021.
) 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. The creators of these fake papers have been dubbed paper mills, and they operate by reaching out to scientists and offering to write papers with the scientists’ names at the top — for a price.
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.
In that disturbed ecosystem, parasitic companies flourish by helping scientists che.