“How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals”

Chetan Chawla points us to this disturbing news article from Harriet Alexander:

In 2015, molecular oncologist Jennifer Byrne was surprised to discover during a scan of the academic literature that five papers had been written about a gene she had originally identified, but did not find particularly interesting.

“Looking at these papers, I thought they were really similar, they had some mistakes in them and they had some stuff that didn’t make sense at all,” she said. As she dug deeper, it dawned on her that the papers might have been produced by a third-party working for profit. . . .”

The more she investigated, the more clear it became that a cottage industry in academic fraud was infecting the literature. In 2017, she uncovered 48 similarly suspicious papers and brought them to the attention of the journals, resulting in several retractions, but the response from the publishing industry was varied, she said.

“A lot of journals don’t really want to know,” she said. . . .

More recently, she and a French collaborator developed a software tool that identified 712 papers from a total of more than 11,700 which contain wrongly identified sequences that suggest they were produced in a paper mill. . . .

Even if the research was published in low-impact journals, it still had the potential to derail legitimate cancer research, and anybody who tried to build on it would be wasting time and grant money . . . Publishers and researchers have reported an extraordinary proliferation in junk science over the last decade, which has infiltrated even the most esteemed journals. Many bear the hallmarks of having been produced in a paper mill: submitted by authors at Chinese hospitals with similar templates or structures. Paper mills operate several models, including selling data (which may be fake), supplying entire manuscripts or selling authorship slots on manuscripts that have been accepted for publication.

The Sydney Morning Herald has learned of suicides among graduate students in China when they heard that their research might be questioned by authorities. Many universities have made publication a condition of students earning their masters or doctorates, and it is an open secret that the students fudge the data. . . .

In 2017, responding to a fake peer review scandal that resulted in the retraction of 107 papers from a Springer Nature journal, the Chinese government cracked down and created penalties for research fraud. Universities stopped making research output a condition of graduation or the number of articles a condition of promotion. . . . But those familiar with the industry say the publication culture has prevailed because universities still compete for research funding and rankings. . . . The Chinese government’s investigation of the 107 papers found only 11 per cent were produced by paper mills, with the remainder produced in universities. . . .

As Chawla writes, what’s scary is the idea that this Greshaming isn’t just happening in the Freakonomics/Gladwell/NPR/Ted/Psychological Science axis of bogus social science storytelling; it’s also occurring in fields such as cancer research, which we tend to think of as being more serious. OK, not always, but usually, right??

I continue to think that the way forward is to put everything on preprint servers and turn journals into recommender systems. The system would still have to deal with paper mills, but perhaps the problem would he easier to handle through post-publication review.