A new study published in PNAS provides further insights into the scale of the industrially-produced research papers from ‘paper mills’.
In their article The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, authors Reese Richardson, Spencer Hong, Jennifer Byrne, Thomas Stoeger, and Luís Nunes Amaral reveal a network of connected activities that extend beyond the production of fake papers to ‘brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.’
The analysis and illustrations in this article provide some clear and potentially surprising insights into the structure and operations of paper mills and their extended network of collaborators.
In a blog post on his website, lead author Reese Richardson summarises his own take on their work, with seven key features of the paper and their implications:
1. Editors abuse their positions of authority to collude with authors to publish problematic articles en masse.
2. Networks of image duplication can be thousands of articles wide and these articles tend to appear in the same journals at around the same time.
3. Broker organizations are capable of placing articles in journals on demand and adapt well under adversarial conditions.
4. Some fields appear to be more vulnerable to paper mill activity than others.
5. Publishers understand that systematic fraud underlies the bulk of their integrity issues.
6. The integrity measures used to contain systematic scientific fraud are dwarfed in scale by the problem itself.
The paper illustrates the extent of these networks and cautions that this enterprise is evading interventions, and the number of fraudulent publications is growing at a rate outpacing that of legitimate science.
The paper is published under paywall at PNAS, but Richardson has made a pdf available from his blog here.
Reference:
R.A.K. Richardson, S.S. Hong, J.A. Byrne, T. Stoeger, & L.A.N. Amaral, The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (32) e2420092122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122 (2025).