Worrying news

From the International Mathematical Union newsletter:

Paper mills and predatory journals have strongly professionalised their activities in the past 10 years and are now creating a substantial revenue. There is a growing parallel universe of fake mathematical science that undermines the trust in science and devaluates the classical selection criteria for scientific excellence based on the (over-)use of bibliometrics). The concrete starting point was that in November 2023, Clarivate (the company computing impact factors of journals that owns “Web of Science”) announced that it had excluded the entire field of mathematics from the most recent edition of its list of authors of highly cited papers because of extensive citation manipulation.