You will want this topic, fake research.
The link went hardly noticed elsewhere
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html
A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half.
I saw it, crazy. Between constant scamming and the lies we’re being fed, now we have to worry about scientific fraud? Bonkers. Let’s hope a benevolent species of aliens puts us out of our collective misery very soon.
Scientific fraud has been talked about since the later 1990’s/early noughts.
That’s when I started hearing the term “Pal Reviewed studies.” I suppose one reason it got buried pretty fast was because it was around the same time that Quack who did the “study” showing the link between vaccines and autism was being talked about a lot.
Then, about 10-15 yrs ago I heard the term “reproducibility crisis.” Not exactly fraud but doesn’t make the whole science thing look good.
In reality, this phenom…..along with its partner Science By Press Release….is more a feature of the Scientific landscape over the past 2 or 3 decades. It almost parallels the growth of the internet and the perceived need for speed in disseminating scientific data.
The NYT article isn’t the only source, of course …..it never is when press releases are circulated through media outlets (including….the MailOnline) Examples that aren’t behind a paywall (at least for me)
Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry,’ alarming analysis finds | Science | AAAS https://share.google/vYGa5TY05jaLOTPYC
Brokers of scientific fraud growing rapidly, study finds Brokers of scientific fraud growing rapidly, study finds
Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate | EurekAlert! Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate | EurekAlert!
A phenom for the times (certainly wasn’t this big an issue back in the 1970s when my didactic training and exposure to journals and Index Medicus and rickety medical library stairs began …. and “pay to publish“ journals did not exist.
Another erosion of the value of the Scientific Method are the increasing use and citation of pre-prints…..where accounts of someone’s research project is touted as if it’s been published and reviewed. The pre being the dead giveaway that it has not!
I don’t think this is a recent development. I am still waiting to buy my personal jet pack that my Weekly Reader or Scholastic News promised me we would all be using to zip from home to the office by the 21st century.
The central issue is the general public. Think how people were taken in during Covid. Mercola released 400 papers during the first two years of Covid.
The vitamin industry has always had these reports. The diet industry as well.
Often Ph.Ds are behind this. Not always intentionally. But often trying to profit off of stupid beliefs instead of science.
One of the problems Ph.D researchers face, the lab is not the same in its results as the clinical offices. There are often huge disconnects. Human beings do not respond the same way to mice or to other experiments based on humans.
Here’s an interesting overview….from over a decade ago..
Editorial: Paying to Publish — What is Open Access and Why is it Important? - PMC Editorial: Paying to Publish — What is Open Access and Why is it Important? - PMC
Apparently, not just in the biomedical sciences but the “hard” stuff like math.
The rise of pay-to-publish journals and the decline of peer review « Math Scholar The rise of pay-to-publish journals and the decline of peer review « Math Scholar
And here’s a forthright opinion…
The ‘pay-to-publish’ model should be abolished | Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science https://share.google/9UcZD46N9LA5kzxAE
My husband had a slide on this very topic for one of his lectures on critical thinking in medical research given to medical students, and it catalogued the increase in number of journals over the years (centuries, really….he started with the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society back in the 1600s) ….and the exponential increase as the open access, pay to publish, and the predatory journals hit the scene)
I wouldn’t trust a “pay to publish” journal. The journals we published in were ones the readers had to subscribe to.
Pre-prints are not uncommon, but -at least when I was in grad school- they were more like a movie preview. Meant to create anticipation, not meant for citing. Mostly because the full article hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.
“Fraud” is very risky. Just ask Pons and Fleishmann, if you can even find them. Honest mistakes are one thing, but one instance of fraud and your career was over. No one will touch you after that.
I assume medical is similar. My background is physics (more specifically, astrophysics). Granted, 30 years ago. But there was no tolerance for shenanigans.
Pons and Fleishmann….names I haven’t thought about in a while. Back in the day, the old Health and Nutrition Board tended to be a magnet for folk with odd ideas about how the body…..and biomedical sciences and research in general worked.
One particular poster seemed to be particularly bullible (gullible where bullspit is concerned) and would link dump to all manner of twaddle that seemed to have research backing….and cite the Galileo Gambit when anyone poked merciless fun at studies on, say, cottage cheese enemas (Old Lags will know immediately who this is!). I would counter with, for every Galileo, there’s a Peter Duesderg, Pons and Fleishmann…..and Andrew Wakefield.
Forget Covid, go back, way back, to the BIGGEST EVER case of people being taken in by a scientific fraudster … the Andrew Wakefield case.
This is a mistake of sorts. Proper articles are put out, are peer reviewed, then they backfire as worthless. That does not stop the press.
Does he happen to state he also has a Ph.D?
I have to laugh. I am busy. I do not read endlessly when people here get bogged down in stuff. It is a waste of time. I am not retired.
I have no clue what you are talking about. I believe every word you are saying. The information is worthless long before anyone has to ever know.
Yup. It also reflects the growing number of international journals from countries where journal integrity is not as consistent a priority.
Those of us who do scientific research and so are dependent on the literature have had to deal with this problem our entire career. The answer is pretty simple and multifaceted.
First, is that after a few years one gets to know the players in the field and the quality of their published research. That’s why scientific meetings are important. Folks usually present their preliminary data at meetings so it is rare that a major finding is a surprise and those of us paying attention have a general impression of the quality of the research. When such surprises happen, the level of skepticism rises.
Second, the journal one publishes in matters. Some are much better at screening manuscripts than others.
Finally and most important, we scientists typically remain skeptical of findings until it has been independently replicated/confirmed by another lab. Preferably multiple other labs.
A lot is made of this in the press and it is a problem. But I can honestly say from experience that those of us with Ph.Ds who are doing research are far, far more skeptical about publications than the general press or all the many scientist wannabes on social media. Our opinions are generally not based on one paper cherry-picked from a Google search. It is based on our understanding of the available publications supplemented by what we hear at meetings and other interactions. We are a skeptical bunch.
STEM PhD training in the USA is not about learning techniques or understanding the literature. One certainly does some of that, but that isn’t the priority. The priority is to develop critical reasoning skills. One common method is the journal club where a grad student presents a paper and their opinion of it with challenges and criticisms every step of the way from the audience. I can recall being asked by a Nobel-prize winner why would I be naive enough to accept the claim of a particular paper and specifically what were the inadequacies in the controls used. Tough on one’s ego but essential training to do research.
Fools were not suffered.
Maybe at the PhD level. When I was in school, “critical thinking” was not a thing until I was working on my MBA. For most of us Proles, “critical thinking” was not part of the program, until the 70s, when questioning authority became permissible, in some fields, for a while. In the public schools I went to, in the 60s, conformity was what was taught.
I was reading reports of the latest diktat from his nibs, wrt banking, today. Banks are no longer allowed to consider “reputational risk” in their decisions. Now, it seems that a person can be a total bag of slime, fraudster, and general crook, and banks can’t consider the blowback they may suffer from dealing with such a lowlife, in their decisions.
The order also calls for bank regulators to strike a particular kind of risk assessment from their guidance and supervision efforts known as reputational risk. Two federal bank regulators — the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — have already eliminated reputational risk as part of their bank examination programs. The FDIC has signaled it plans to follow suit.
In somewhat related “news”, a high level official at the FBI was fired, for daring to say “this is wrong”.
Steve
I think the chief culprit here is the priority for quality or quantity. Study and publish everything and everything and see what sticks. Maybe you find gold. Everyone that wants to keep a job at an academic institution, clinician or researcher, has to continuously be “productive” ie publish multiple things a year to justify thier funding (ie salary). Or they will be replaced. Whether or not this had led to any discernible public or industrial is less important and harder to measure. We have x studies and x published papers and x grants at our great institution.
The pressure on these individuals is great. Thier job depends on it. We have meetings to nitpick low hanging fruit, low cost, easy follow up, must get published by June to submit to this meeting. Rather than, hey here’s this problem we want to solve, what the approach, what do you want to look at, how do we study it, etc.
Yep….Publish or perish. Given the temptation to cut corners, it’s enough to make a person wonder how long before GenAI starts providing the sort of evidence in journals that’s apparently bamboozling the lawyers….or how long it’s been going on already. Seems like basic fact checking or attempts to falsify/refute a hypothesis has become too much of a luxury.
“Publish or perish” is one reason I bailed on my PhD, and went into industry. I would have liked academia, but as a grad student I saw that first-hand. One professor a friend of mine assisted broke up a single paper into -as I recall- three papers, to get more publications. My favorite professor was always being hounded because he didn’t publish “enough”, but he was a very popular professor among students. He loved teaching, and was good at it.
I get that they want to publications for university prestige (another reason NOT to commit fraud, or you’ll be terminated and no one will touch you). But the games and hounding associated with publishing was very off-putting.
The Ph.Ds are guilty in the first place. The trash being dredged up as research is a major problem. The lines between science and beliefs endlessly cross, and the public the poorer for it.
The Ph.Ds are the fools in the first place.
It has to do with beliefs. Dressing up one’s words as science does not mean it is not really personal beliefs. The failures among Ph.D researchers are astonishing.
The paper mills have plenty of Ph.Ds writing for them. It is not like it is a subclass of Ph.Ds.