Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

[icymist]

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. That's truly scary.

I've been slightly aware of fake papers for some time now. I wonder if they are more common in certain sciences than others.

I think I'll ask My Son The Astronomer if he's aware of fake papers in his field. I'm going to guess the answer will be no, because there would be less incentive to publish them, and more pushback for ones which are published. Just a guess here.

[niyad]

2. Somebody cited pubmed to me the other day to validate some absurd claim.

Last edited Wed May 10, 2023, 08:34 AM - Edit history (1)

I went looking. Okay, looks like NIH (national institutes of health). But what I was told was garbage, so I found it hard to believe NIH actually published the garbage. Looked a little further. Thousands upon thousands of articles in their data base, and they do not swear to the validity of them. So junk can be published, and look legit because it is on the NIH website, but nobody there may have even seen it.

[Lulu KC]

4. Wow! n/t

[Beakybird]

3. Crazy and scary 🤯

[Steve_N]

5. garbage science

"Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital".

... or in other words: this "research" is complete and utter garbage.

[RussBLib]

6. Welcome to DU!

So you are saying that the detection method used to detect garbage is garbage itself?

[xocetaceans]

7. The first question is why a preprint is being used as source material for an article in Science.

If this preprint is publishable after peer-review, the Science article's author should go ahead then and use it to support his article.

The second question is what your complaint against the preprint specifically is. You allow your comment's reader to infer a lot, but actually say nothing other than your repeated claim of "garbage". Do you care to elaborate or is your comment set up ironically to parallel your complaint?

Fake Publications in Biomedical Science: Red-flagging Method Indicates Mass Production
Bernhard A. Sabel, Emely Knaack, Gerd Gigerenzer, Mirela Bilc

...

Methods To identify indicators able to red-flagged fake publications (RFPs), we sent questionnaires to authors. Based on author responses, three indicators were identified: “author’s private email”, “international co-author” and “hospital affiliation”. These were used to analyze 15,120 PubMed®-listed publications regarding date, journal, impact factor, and country of author and validated in a sample of 400 known fakes and 400 matched presumed non-fakes using classification (tallying) rules to red-flag potential fakes. For a subsample of 80 papers we used an additional indicator related to the percentage of RFP citations.

Results The classification rules using two (three) indicators had sensitivities of 86% (90%) and false alarm rates of 44% (37%). From 2010 to 2020 the RFP rate increased from 16% to 28%. Given the 1.3 million biomedical Scimago-listed publications in 2020, we estimate the scope of >300,000 RFPs annually. Countries with the highest RFP proportion are Russia, Turkey, China, Egypt, and India (39%-48%), with China, in absolute terms, as the largest contributor of all RFPs (55%).

Conclusions Potential fake publications can be red-flagged using simple-to-use, validated classification rules to earmark them for subsequent scrutiny.

...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.06.23289563v1

[BadgerKid]

8. "Publish or perish" incentivize paper mills and now AI.