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Parse that however you wish, we're plagued with them.

On an average day, I receive solicitations to write papers from them three or four times.  Sometimes they offer me editorships or guest editorships for designated issues.  Sometimes (but not often) they offer me money.  All such e-mails immediately go in the trash, but they leave a bad taste and are unsettling.

What's really bad now is that, whereas they used to come from places I had never heard of, now the fake science sickness has infected some of our mainstream publishing  houses.

"Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures:
Wiley to shutter 19 more journals, some tainted by fraud"
By Nidhi Subbaraman, WSJ (May 14, 2024)

Why do we have far more of this skulduggery and dishonesty now than we did in the past?

The manifestations of this malaise are more than you can shake a stick at.

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. 

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat.”

Subbaraman, the author of the WSJ article, provides concrete examples of flagrant attempts to circumvent or compromise the legitimate review process.  Although dastardly, some of them are hilarious.  One of the good guys, Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.”

Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” The tool is publicly available.

At the center of these unscrupulous enterprises are the “paper mills” —

businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

Legitimate scientists and publishers are using AI to spot tell-tale signs of submission fraudulence, but the fraudsters fight back with AI tools of their own to confuse and overwhelm the genuine scientists and honest publishers.

“It’s like a virus mutating,” said Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, one of a multitude of researchers who track fraudulent science and has spotted suspected milled papers.

…

Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.

What to do?  Instead of always being on the defensive and at the mercy of the culprits, the accredited authorities should go on the offensive and work for the enactment of laws and penalties.  Make these crimes of sham scholarship cost.

Selected readings

• Archive for Open Access
• "Beyond the zombies: How we might get out of the science publication disaster" (8/28/17)
• "Bad Science" (10/19/13)

[thanks to Mark Metcalf]

May 14, 2024 @ 8:55 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and science

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