Fake Papers Flood Scientific Journals

“A growing tide of fake papers is flooding the scientific record and proliferating faster than current checks can rid them from the system, scientists warn.

 

The source of the trouble is "paper mills," businesses or individuals that charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.

 

The rate of fake papers generated by these operators roughly doubled every 1 1/2 years between 2016 and 2020, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"The entire structure of science could collapse if this is left unaddressed," said study author Luis Amaral, a Northwestern University physicist.

 

Paper mills look for weak links, such as lax verification protocols, in the typically rigorous publication machinery, then exploit those to place hundreds of fabricated studies with vulnerable journals or publishers, according to scientist investigators.

 

It can be a costly mess to clean up.

 

Publishers who have become aware of suspected paper mill activity have been forced to retract hundreds of papers at once, and in some cases shut down journals.

 

After retracting more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, Wiley, a U.S.-based publisher with a portfolio of 1,600 journals, last year said it would shut 19 of its publications, including some that had shown signs of takeover by paper mills.

 

More recently, Taylor & Francis, an academic publisher of over 2,700 journals, said it would stop taking submissions to its journal Bioengineered while its editors investigated past papers for paper mill activity.

 

But tracking the scale of these organized operations has been difficult. When paper mills are detected, they change their tactics, and few publishers disclose when they have been targeted.

 

"We only know about Wiley because they have been transparent about the way that they were trying to handle these issues," said Reese Richardson, a data scientist who studies publishing at Northwestern and who is an author on the PNAS study.

 

The authors of the study created a database of suspected paper mill papers, over 32,700 in all, from nearly every publisher, by assembling the work of other volunteer investigators who have been cataloging groups of studies with similar patterns.

 

With a big-data approach that spans the published scientific record, the new study confirms trends that scientist investigators of shoddy papers have shown for years.

 

Artificial intelligence makes the trend especially concerning, said James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who wasn't involved with the study. Because large language models are consuming scientific literature without discriminating between legitimate and fraudulent papers, paper mills can "muddy the waters of science and scientific understanding," Evans said.” [1]

 

1. U.S. News: Fake Papers Flood Scientific Journals. Subbaraman, Nidhi.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Aug 2025: A3.