Researchers claim that a new study has found tactics, including made-up research and paid authorships and citations, by which organised scientific fraud is rising and undermining the integrity of science at a quicker rate than legitimate science is growing.
According to the findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, research organisations connive to publish papers in several publications that are frequently withdrawn on being exposed.
Led by a team from Northwestern University in the United States, researchers also discovered organised groups dodging quality-control procedures, including journal de-indexing and "brokers" acting as middlemen to allow the widespread publication of bogus papers in compromised publications.
Indexing a journal in a database of scientific literature improves its visibility and makes it easily discoverable to researchers and the public, while de-indexing removes it.
The authors wrote, "Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions," which is "enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science".
The team analysed datasets involving retracted research papers, editorial records and instances of image duplication.
Most of the data came from aggregators, which are platforms that gather, index and organise scientific papers and books, and make them searchable and accessible to researchers and public. The study looked at 'Web of Science' (managed by Clarivate), 'Scopus' (by Elsevier) and 'PubMed' (by the US' National Institutes of Health), among others.
Instances of and concerns surrounding misconduct in science -- which can include plagiarism, reporting fake data, a lack of quality control over a research submitted for editorial review, among others -- typically look at single individuals, the researchers said.
However, the team's analysis instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing, they said.
Coordinated efforts involving 'paper mills', brokers and infiltrated journals were found.
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'Paper mills' refers to individuals or groups who churn out large numbers of low-quality manuscripts -- featuring fabricated data, plagiarised content and sometimes physically impossible claims -- which are sold to academics wanting to quickly publish new work, the researchers explained.
"These networks are essentially criminal organisations, acting together to fake the process of science. Millions of dollars are involved in these processes," senior author Luís A. N. Amaral, professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics and an expert in complex social systems, Northwestern University, said.
Amaral added that more scientists are getting caught up in paper mills, through which they can also "buy citations" and "appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all".
A citation of a research is a means of acknowledging the work and crediting its authors. Citations are critical for academic integrity and add credence to a research paper.
Amaral added, "Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity. If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behaviour will become normalised. At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned." The researchers underscore the importance of addressing the issues before artificial intelligence infiltrates scientific literature more than it already has.
"If we're not prepared to deal with the fraud that's already occurring, then we're certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature," said first author Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral's laboratory, Northwestern University.
"We have no clue what's going to end up in the literature, what's going to be regarded as scientific fact and what's going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers," Richardson said.
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