Garbage In, Garbage Out: Scientific Publishing Faces Pandemic-Like Spread of Fake Studies

A professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern University, Luís Amaral, describes his latest research — on fraud in scientific publishing — as “probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with in my entire life.” Despite having spent his career studying complex social systems — how institutions fracture and how incentives corrupt behavior at scale — Mr. Amaral says nothing prepared him for what he and his colleagues uncovered when they turned their analytical lens toward the global scientific publishing apparatus.His recent study, published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” found that organized scientific fraud, involving networks of paper mills, brokers, and compromised journals, is increasing rapidly and now outpaces the growth of legitimate publications. The repercussions of fraudulent science cannot be understated, he warns. “If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized,” Mr. Amaral told reporters at his university. “At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned. Some people worry that talking about this issue is attacking science. But I strongly believe we are defending science from bad actors.”A Criminal Enterprise, Not a Rogue LabPeer-reviewed literature underpins medical treatments, public health guidance, pharmaceutical approvals, and policy decisions at every level of government. If the literature is being systematically poisoned, the downstream effects touch virtually everything that relies on the authority of science.For decades, the public narrative around scientific fraud centered on the lone bad actor — the ambitious researcher who fudged a dataset, the graduate student who plagiarized a passage. That framing, the Northwestern team argues, is now dangerously outdated. For the co-founder of Retraction Watch, Ivan Oransky, the reckoning has been a long time coming.“Publishers really need to acknowledge that they’ve known about paper mills since at least 2013,” Mr. Oransky told The New York Sun. “Now they’ve grown a lot, and they’ve industrialized. They don’t just sell papers. They sell authorships, citation manipulation, and ways to boost your standing in the rankings. And now, of course, they’re using AI to do even more of it.”In their research, Mr. Amaral and his colleagues uncovered sophisticated global networks systematically undermining the integrity of academic publishing. At the center are paper mills, outfits functioning like production lines for academic manuscripts, selling papers to researchers who want to pad their publication records quickly. These manuscripts often contain fabricated data, manipulated or stolen images, plagiarized text, and sometimes claims that are scientifically impossible. Scientists can buy not just papers, but also citations — conjuring the appearance of a well-regarded academic career from nearly nothing.By any measure, the market is profitable. Authorship slots sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. One survey of medical residents at tertiary hospitals in southwest China found that nearly 47 percent of respondents reported buying and selling papers or having others write them. Some major publishers have estimated that as many as one in seven submissions show signs of paper mill origin.The incentives, Mr. Oransky explained, extend well beyond individual researchers, all the way up to the institutions employing them, creating a system in which fraud is not just tolerated but structurally rewarded.“If you spend a few hundred, even a few thousand dollars to buy a paper that is guaranteed to be published, and then because of that you end up getting tenure or a promotion, as an investment, you can see how it makes sense,” he said. “Universities benefit too. The international university rankings are, I would argue, pernicious in their impact. It’s kind of like Lance Armstrong — it’s the same kind of doping, but in academia.”The corruption runs deeper than publish-or-perish anxiety, said the chief editor of the “Radiation and Health” journal at Frontiers in Public Health and adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki, Professor Dariusz Leszczynski. “Financial incentives are a very important factor. However, not only is money the problem,” Mr. Leszczynski told the Sun. “Advancing careers through ‘beefing up’ publication records is pretty common. Also, climbing up the ladder and becoming a recognized expert through ‘fake citations’ is also common.”The fraud does not stop at fabricated manuscripts. Brokers serve as intermediaries, connecting paper mills to compromised journals while bypassing quality controls. When legitimate journals prove too difficult to penetrate, these networks target defunct publications. “This happened to the journal ‘HIV Nursing,’” a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, Reese Richardson, told the Sun. “It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the United Kingdom, but it stopped publishing, and its online domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain name and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing, all indexed in Scopus.”Despite efforts to curb paper mills, suspected paper-milled articles are growing exponentially, doubling every one and a half years — compared to total publications, which double every 15 years. In 2023 alone, publishers retracted more than 10,000 papers, a record driven largely by the collapse of publisher Hindawi, which retracted over 8,000 articles after paper mills were found to have systematically infiltrated its journals, costing parent company Wiley an estimated $35 million to $40 million.A cancer researcher at the University of Sydney and co-author of the National Academy of Sciences study, Professor Jennifer Byrne, told the Sun that awareness can help researchers sniff out suspicious studies. “Implausible results, or results that don’t align with other sources of reliable information, can alert researchers that research might be questionable or fraudulent,” she said. “Awareness of paper mills and the possibility of fraudulent papers is therefore currently researchers’ best protection.”Awareness alone, however, cannot fix the underlying rot. What has been caught may be only a fraction of what is actually out there.“You can see a scenario in a decade or less where you could have more than half of studies being published each year being fraudulent,” Mr. Richardson said. The team’s statistical model estimates that the total number of paper mill products in circulation may be as much as 100 times greater than those identified — a figure that, if accurate, suggests the scientific record has already been compromised at a scale that existing tools cannot meaningfully address.Mr. Oransky described the strain on peer review as a system asked to absorb an ever-growing flood with dwindling capacity — volunteer reviewers, already stretched thin, now triaging an industrialized tide of fraudulent manuscripts rather than evaluating genuine science. “They can’t cope. It’s a bit like during the COVID pandemic, all of a sudden, we have hospitals overwhelmed with COVID patients, and you can’t treat people who are having heart attacks or cancer,” Ms. Byrne said.Paper mills have further exploited the system by engineering entire special issues of journals, sometimes paying editors directly, with documented payments reaching $20,000 per editor. The National Academy of Science proceedings amount to “killer evidence” for longstanding suspicions about editor-author collusion, according to a bibliometrician at the University of Vigo, Domingo Docampo. Ms. Byrne warned that shutting down individual networks may prove futile. “Paper mills could be like an octopus. If one arm is removed, the organization can survive because any single paper mill is only part of a larger organization,” she said.The AI Reckoning That Hasn’t Arrived YetThe researchers are explicit that what has been documented so far represents the pre-artificial intelligence phase of the problem. “If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do,” Mr. Richardson has warned. AI chatbots are already drawing on material from retracted scientific papers to answer questions, raising serious questions about the reliability of these tools when evaluating the scientific record.Mr. Oransky described the garbage-in, garbage-out dynamic as an arms race that the scientific community is not winning. “The clever fraudsters, by the time we find out about some nefarious scheme of theirs, they’ve probably quit that one and are figuring out three new ones,” he said. “There’s always a lag.” Ms. Byrne noted that generative AI threatens to upend even the existing underground economy of fake science, allowing bad actors to scale manuscript production without ever engaging a paper mill. “There’ll be no silver bullet that can contain this problem,” she said.For Mr. Leszczynski, the crisis ultimately circles back to individual conscience in a system that has made dishonesty profitable. “The most worrisome is the rapid development of AI, making it more and more difficult to find, to prove, and to discredit fake studies,” he said. “Pandora’s box is open, and there is no return. Only our own scientific vigilance, morality, and ethics can help to avoid major disaster.”

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Scientific Publishing Faces Pandemic-Like Spread of Fake Studies

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