{"id":13565,"date":"2025-02-16T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=13565"},"modified":"2025-02-04T03:10:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T03:10:42","slug":"bogus-scientific-papers-fraudsters-february-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/bogus-scientific-papers-fraudsters-february-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Bogus scientific papers are enriching fraudsters and slowing lifesaving medical research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Assistant professor Frank Cackowski, left, and researcher Steven Zielske at Wayne State University in Detroit became suspicious of a paper on cancer research that was eventually retracted.\n Amy Sacka<\/span>, CC BY-ND<\/a><\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\n Frederik Joelving<\/a>, Retraction Watch<\/a><\/em>; Cyril Labb\u00e9<\/a>, Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes (UGA)<\/a><\/em>, and Guillaume Cabanac<\/a>, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse<\/a><\/em><\/span>\n\n

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.<\/p>\n\n

It is exceedingly difficult<\/a> to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date<\/a>, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud<\/a> estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating \u2013 possibly as many as several hundred thousand<\/a>. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.<\/p>\n\n

Even when bogus papers are spotted \u2013 usually by amateur sleuths on their own time \u2013 academic journals are often slow to retract<\/a> the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews and other research and discusses findings.<\/p>\n\n

These fake papers are slowing research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies, from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts\u2019 data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard-hit, while areas such as philosophy and art are less affected. <\/p>\n\n

To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we \u2013 a contributing editor at Retraction Watch<\/a>, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France\u2019s Universit\u00e9 Toulouse III\u2013Paul Sabatier<\/a> and Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes<\/a> who specialize in detecting bogus publications \u2013 spent six months investigating paper mills.<\/p>\n\n

Co-author Guillaume Cabanac also developed the Problematic Paper Screener<\/a>, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers<\/a> every week looking for nine types of clues<\/a> that a paper might be fake or contain errors.<\/p>\n\n