Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
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.
Sabel’s tool relies on just two indi...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news
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