A small number of research paper mills are responsible for a significant proportion of detected scientific paper fraud, according to research by Northwestern University researchers.
Just 45 PLOS ONE editors were responsible for 30.2% of retracted PLOS ONE articles in 2024, despite the fact that they edited just 1.3% of all articles and comprised only 0.25% of all editors on the platform. More than half of these editors also authored retracted articles.
The authors used large scale publication analysis to analyse the extent of fraud and believe that the publication of fraudulent research is growing faster than legitimate papers.
The authors said their research helped disprove that scientific fraud only occurred at the periphery in countries outside the OECD, adding that “large North American and European publishers and the editors they appoint provide credibility to these practices”.
“The trends we expose forecast serious risks ahead for the scientific enterprise. Large groups of editors and authors appear to have cooperated to facilitate publishing fraud,” The authors state.
“Networks of linked fraudulent articles suggest industrial scale of production. Organizations selling contract cheating services anticipate and counter deindexing and other interventions by literature aggregators. The literature in some fields may have already been irreparably damaged by fraud.
“Only 8,589 of the 29,956 suspected paper mill products in our corpus that have a corresponding record in OpenAlex have been retracted (28.7%). Extrapolating from current trends, we estimate that only around 25% of suspected paper mill products will ever be retracted and that only around 10% of suspected paper mill products will ever reside in a deindexed journal.
“Collectively, these findings show that the integrity of the extant scientific record and of future science is being undermined through the shortcomings in the very systems through which scientists infer the trustworthiness of each other’s work.”
CSIRO staff have warned that while AI tools are being used to help spot research fraud, they can also be used to avoid detection.