The New NIH Medical Journal

Speaking of fraudulent research:

[A] paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints an alarming picture. Northwestern University metascientist Reese Richardson and his colleagues identify networks of editors and authors colluding to publish shoddy or fraudulent papers, report that large organizations are placing batches of fake papers in journals, suggest brokers may serve as intermediaries between paper mills and intercepted journals, and find that the number of fake papers—though still relatively small—seems to be increasing at a rate far greater than the scientific literature generally.

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientific-fraud-has-become-industry-alarming-analysis-finds

Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry,’ alarming analysis finds
Sophisticated global networks are infiltrating journals to publish fake papers
By Cathleen O’Grady - o4 August 2025

For years, sleuths who study scientific fraud have been sounding the alarm about the sheer size and sophistication of the industry that churns out fake publications. Now, an extensive investigation finds evidence of a range of bad actors profiting from fraud. The study, based on an analysis of thousands of publications and their authors and editors, shows paper mills are just part of a complex, interconnected system that includes publishers, journals, and brokers.

The paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints an alarming picture. Northwestern University metascientist Reese Richardson and his colleagues identify networks of editors and authors colluding to publish shoddy or fraudulent papers, report that large organizations are placing batches of fake papers in journals, suggest brokers may serve as intermediaries between paper mills and intercepted journals, and find that the number of fake papers—though still relatively small—seems to be increasing at a rate far greater than the scientific literature generally.

The paper shows that misconduct “has become an industry,” says Anna Abalkina of the Free University of Berlin, who studies corruption in science and was not involved with the research. Richardson and colleagues hope their sweeping case will attract attention and spur change.

They began their analysis by pinpointing corrupt editors. They focused their investigation on PLOS ONE, because the megajournal allows easy access to bulk metadata and publishes the names of the editors who have handled the thousands of papers it publishes each year, making it possible to detect anomalies without behind-the-scenes information. The researchers identified all the papers from the journal that had been retracted or received comments on PubPeer—a website that allows researchers to critique published work—and then identified each paper’s editors.

All told, 33 editors stood out as more frequently handling work that was later retracted or criticized than would be expected by chance. “Some of these were immense outliers,” Richardson says. For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted. Flagged editors handled 1.3% of papers published in the journal by 2024, but nearly one-third of all retracted papers.

The team also spotted that these editors worked on certain authors’ papers at a suspiciously high rate. These authors were often editors at PLOS ONE themselves, and they often handled each other’s papers. It’s possible that some editors are being paid bribes, Richardson says, but “also possible that these are informal arrangements that are being made among colleagues.” The researchers detected similarly questionable editor behavior in 10 journals published by Hindawi, an open-access publisher that was shuttered because of rampant paper mill activity after Wiley acquired it. A spokesperson for Wiley told Science the publisher has made “significant investments to address research integrity issues.”

Renee Hoch, head of publication ethics at PLOS, said in an email to Science that the publisher has long been aware of networks like these, and will assess whether any of the editors implicated are still on the journal’s editorial board, opening investigations if they are. She emphasizes that the study focused on PLOS because of its readily accessible data: “Paper mills are truly an industry-wide problem.”

Researchers working on paper mills have long assumed that editors and authors have been colluding. The new findings are “killer evidence” for these suspicions, says Domingo Docampo, a bibliometrician at the University of Vigo. He adds that although the findings only show collusion at a limited number of journals, others are probably affected. Just last week, Retraction Watch reported that the publisher Frontiers had begun to retract 122 papers after discovering a network of editors and authors “who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest,” according to a company statement. The network of 35 individuals has also published more than 4000 papers in journals from seven other publishers, the company said, which require further scrutiny. A Frontiers spokesperson said they planned to share information with the other affected publishers.

Richardson and his colleagues found that the problem goes far beyond networks of unscrupulous editors and authors scratching each other’s backs. They identified what appear to be coordinated efforts to arrange the publication of batches of dubious papers in multiple journals.

The team looked at more than 2000 papers flagged on PubPeer for containing duplicated images and identified clusters of papers that all shared images. Those sets of papers were often published around the same time and in a limited selection of journals. Looking at patterns of duplicated images is an “absolutely innovative” method for investigating these networks, Abalkina says. “No-one has done this before.”

In some cases, the authors suggest, a single paper mill that infiltrated multiple journals may be responsible. But they also believe some of these clusters reflect the work of “brokers” who act as go-betweens, taking papers produced by mills and placing them at compromised journals.

The team dug into the workings of the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), based in Chennai, India, which offers services including “thesis/article writing” as well as “journal publication” in a list of dozens of journals. On a web page listing “high impact journals” on offer, ARDA says that it liaises with journals on behalf of researchers and “[ensures] they get published successfully in the High Impact Indexing Database journal of their choice.”

Over several years, ARDA’s list of journals has evolved, the team found, with new publications added to the list and others removed after being delisted by bibliometric databases because of fishy behavior. The journals often publish transparently “problematic” articles, Richardson says, and ARDA charges between $250 and $500 for publication, based on quotes offered to Richardson and his colleagues. The website asks authors to submit their own papers, suggesting ARDA itself is not a paper mill, but rather a go-between, Richardson says.

ARDA did not respond to a request for comment.

Organizations like these operate in broad daylight, under the guise of providing “editorial services,” says Lokman Meho, an information scientist at the American University of Beirut. Although their operations may be unethical—with stark consequences for science and scientists—they don’t care about trying to hide, he says, because “it is actually not illegal to run such businesses.”

The problems Richardson and his colleagues documented are growing fast. The team built a list of papers identified in 55 databases of likely paper mill products, looking at the number of suspicious papers published each year between 2016 and 2020. (They excluded the past few years of data because it takes time for fraudulent papers to be discovered and retracted.) They found that the number of suspected paper mill products doubled every 1.5 years—10 times faster than the rate of growth of the literature as a whole, although still a small proportion of papers overall. The number of retractions and papers flagged on PubPeer had also risen fast, doubling every 3.3 and 3.6 years, respectively, but not keeping pace with the increase in suspected fraudulent papers. “This means that the percentage of fraudulent science is growing,” Abalkina says. That poses particular risks to fields like medical science, where the fake papers sometimes make their way into systematic reviews and meta-analyses, potentially distorting our understanding of drugs and treatments, she says.

One contributor is the rapid growth of science, says Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a science studies scholar at Leiden University. Paper mill products are often buried in low-impact journals and are written to get little attention, he says. In small scientific communities, it is harder to hide products like these, but as some fields get larger and more anonymous, such papers can escape detection more easily. And as the scientific workforce has burgeoned, institutions have increasingly turned to evaluating scientists based on how many publications they produce, leading some researchers to bolster their records with fake papers, he says. “Perverse incentives, inflated metrics, the ‘publish or perish’ culture, and systemic tolerance for weak scholarship” all allow paper mills to flourish, says Li Tang, an expert on Chinese research policy at Fudan University.

Young researchers may feel forced into paying for paper mill publications to compete with peers—a ratcheting effect that is already apparent, Richardson says. The number of papers published by medical residency applicants has soared in recent years, for instance, with some students claiming authorship of dozens of papers. He says it’s no coincidence that the paper mill industry targets residency applicants, especially foreign students on visas.

Docampo, Abalkina, and others say there’s little in the new paper that wasn’t already strongly suspected. But the dramatic confirmation that the study offers may shift the needle, they say. “We’re massively behind the curve on making visible and realizing the extent of the problem,” Kaltenbrunner says. “The sheer scale of it is the takeaway message here.”

And unless publishers, funders, and people in charge of hiring and promotion pay attention and penalize this behavior, Docampo says, “it will continue. It’s growing fast.”

Believe the Science, maybe?  😮 

More on the paper mills' discovery:

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fraud-ring-is-publishing-thousands-of-fake-studies-and-the-problem-is-exploding-these-networks-are-essentially-criminal-organizations/

A Massive Fraud Ring Is Publishing Thousands of Fake Studies and the Problem is Exploding. “These Networks Are Essentially Criminal Organizations”
Organized misconduct is rapidly poisoning the global scientific record.
By Tibi Puiu - August 6, 2025 

One awful spring day in 2025, Luís Amaral sat at his desk at Northwestern University after he had just finished “probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with.” He had reason to be disheartened. His new study reveals an uncomfortable truth: scientific fraud is no longer just the work of a few bad apples. It is organized to the point it’s become industrialized — and growing much faster than legitimate science.

What we are seeing is large networks of editors and authors cooperating to publish fraudulent research at scale. They are exploiting cracks in the system to launder reputations, secure funding, and climb academic ranks.

This isn’t just about the occasional plagiarized paragraph or data fudged to fool reviewers. This is about a vast and resilient system that, in some cases, mimics organized crime. And it’s infiltrating the very core of science.

“These networks are essentially criminal organizations,” Amaral said. “Millions of dollars are involved in these processes.”

A Shadow Industry

The study’s findings stem from a sweeping analysis of over five million scientific papers across more than 70,000 journals. Researchers also examined tens of thousands of retractions, journal editorial records, and even image duplications. What emerged is a disturbing ecosystem: fraudulent “paper mills” manufacturing low-quality studies, brokers selling authorship slots and journal placements, and compromised editors willing to rubber-stamp fake research.

One such paper mill, the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), offers a window into how deeply entrenched this problem has become. Notice that they all seem to have legitimate-sounding names. Between 2018 and 2024, ARDA expanded its list of affiliated journals from 14 to 86, many of which were indexed in major academic databases. Some of these journals were later found to be hijacked — illegitimately revived after their original publishers stopped operating. It’s something we’ve seen happen often in our own industry (journalism), as bankrupt legitimate legacy newspapers have been bought by shady venture capital, only to hijack the established brands into spam and affiliate marketing magnets.

What ARDA and similar operations offer isn’t science. It’s superficial credibility and influence, for sale. Clients pay for their names to be placed on prewritten papers, often without contributing any actual research to polish their CVs, which later translates into material advantages.

The System That Allows It

Articles of fraudulent provenance have an apparent growth rategreater than that of the entire scientific enterprise and already far outpacethe scope of science integrity measures currently in use. Credit: PNAS, 2025.

Fraudulent science has always existed, but Richardson’s team found the modern scale unprecedented. Paper mills are now estimated to double their output every 1.5 years. Meanwhile, retractions — the scientific community’s main corrective measure — are doubling every 3.5 years.

In other words, fake science is far outpacing legitimate efforts to catch it. That’s no surprise. Truth seeking has always been expensive, whereas fraud is cheap and fast.

“You either buy into scientific fraud, or you leave science,” the study’s lead author, Reece Richardson, a social scientist at Northwestern University, US, told DW. “This is a situation that tens of thousands of scientists are in.”

The study shows how even some reputable journals have been infiltrated by bad actors. A very small group of editors — fewer than 0.3% at one journal — were found to be responsible for up to 30% of all retracted articles. These editors weren’t catching fraud (one of their main prerogatives); they were enabling it. The analysis revealed that they frequently accepted each other’s submissions, bypassing proper peer review and creating a closed loop of mutual approval. One especially active group at PLOS ONE operated between 2020 and 2023, with many of their accepted papers later retracted for similar reasons: “one of a series of submissions for which we have concerns about authorship, competing interests, and peer review.”

And these aren’t isolated incidents. Similar patterns were identified at Hindawi journals and even in IEEE conference proceedings.

Fraud in the Details

To spot fake science, Richardson’s team looked at things like reused images — telling signs that research data was copied and repackaged. In one network of 2,213 papers with duplicated images, only a third had been retracted.

Other hallmarks of fraud include fast-tracked peer review (under 30 days), odd publication spikes in certain journals, and unnatural authorship patterns — such as unrelated co-authors from across the globe on narrowly focused technical papers.

Many of these fraudulent studies fall into specific subfields, notably areas like micro-RNAs and long noncoding RNAs in cancer biology. The more niche and obscure the research, the better, as it adds another layer of opacity. These subfields saw retraction rates as high as 4%, compared to 0.1% for more established areas like CRISPR.

“You can map out networks of image duplication that are thousands of articles wide,” Richardson said.

Fake Science, Real Consequences

Fraudulent studies mislead scientists, distort meta-analyses, waste public funds, and derail therapeutic development.

Consider the case of Alzheimer’s research. One manipulated paper led to billions in investment and years of follow-up studies before the original research was discredited. During COVID-19, fraudulent studies promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, which indirectly led to as many as 17,000 fatalities.

“It’s incredible what just one paper can do,” said Anna Abalkina, a research integrity expert at the Free University of Berlin.

Scientific careers are built on publication records. The more papers you publish — and the more citations they accrue — the more funding, jobs, tenure teaching positions, and prestige you attract. In a hypercompetitive system with scarce resources, incentives lean toward quantity over quality.

“If you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it,” Amaral said.

The authors argue that existing tools like retractions and journal deindexing, while important, are not enough. Some fake articles remain in databases even after their journals have been deindexed. Others continue to be cited, creating a cascade of misinformation.

Richardson and Amaral advocate for deeper systemic changes: separating conflict-prone tasks like peer review from journals’ business interests, rethinking academic incentives, and moving away from simplistic metrics like citation counts or journal impact factors.

A Looming Threat

The rise of generative AI further complicates matters. If AI models are trained on tainted literature, their outputs — used to generate new research or aid diagnostics — could be compromised from the start. Then there’s the issue of AI-generated science papers. In 2024, a peer-reviewed science journal published a study with an obviously AI-generated diagram showing a cartoon rat with a gigantic penis. Only after the picture made the rounds on social media was the paper retracted.

“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,” Richardson warned.

Some academic publishers, like Springer Nature and Frontiers Media, are starting to issue large-scale retractions — Frontiers recently pulled 122 studies after finding evidence of citation manipulation and undisclosed peer-review collusion. But even these efforts only scratch the surface. Richardson estimates that only 15–25% of fake papers will ever be retracted.

Where Do We Go from Here?

To fix science, experts say the culture must shift. That means funding institutions must reconsider how they measure success. Journals must invest in independent integrity checks. And researchers must be supported in choosing quality over quantity.

“This isn’t about attacking science,” Amaral said. “We are defending it from bad actors.”

The alternative is a slow erosion of trust in one of the most powerful self-correcting tools humanity has ever created. Without reform, future discoveries — and the public good they are meant to serve — may be built on sand.

Compelling graphics at the hyperlink, above.