The Rise of Organized Scientific Fraud: A Growing Threat to Research Integrity

How bad science is becoming big business

Kingston University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK. Researchers are dealing with a disturbing trend that threatens the foundation of scientific progress: scientific fraud has become an industry. And it's growing faster than legitimate peer reviewed science journals can keep up with. This isn't about individual bad actors anymore. We're witnessing the emergence of an organised, systematic approach to scientific fraud. This includes paper mills churning out formulaic research articles, brokerages guaranteeing publication for a fee and predatory journals that bypass quality assurance entirely. These organisations disguise themselves behind respectable sounding labels such as "editing services" or "academic consultants". In reality, their business model depends on corrupting the scientific process. Paper mills operate like content farms, flooding journals with submissions to overwhelm peer review systems. They practice journal targeting, sending multiple papers to one publication, and journal hopping, submitting the same paper to multiple outlets simultaneously. It's a numbers game. If even a fraction slip through, the fraudulent service profits. Is this just a case of scientists being lazy? The answer is more complex and troubling. Today's researchers face constraints that make these fraudulent services increasingly tempting. The pressure to continually produce new research or risk getting your funding cut, called the "publish or perish" culture, is a longstanding problem. As well, governments around the world are facing financial struggles and are looking to trim costs, resulting in less funding for research. Less funding means increased competition. This creates a catch-22 situation for researchers who need publications to win funding but need funding to conduct publishable research. Environmental factors compound the issue. Globalisation means individual researchers are lost in an ocean of competing voices, making the temptation to game the system even stronger. In this environment, the promise of guaranteed publication can seem like a lifeline rather than a Faustian bargain. AI: Acceleration at what cost? The rise of generative AI has supercharged this fraud industry. Researchers are witnessing an explosion in research articles that appear to exploit AI software to produce papers at an unprecedented speed. These papers mine public data sets that offer surface level evidence. These hastily generated papers bear hallmarks of a paper mill production process, including evidence fabrication, data manipulation, ethics misconduct and outright plagiarism. Where a peer reviewer might once have received ten submissions for a conference or journal in a year, they're now drowning in 30 or 40 submissions with a shorter time frame (six months or less), with legitimate research buried in the avalanche. Overwhelmed reviewers, in turn, are tempted to use AI tools to summarise papers, identify gaps in the evidence and even write review responses. This is creating an arms race. Some researchers have started embedding hidden text in their submissions, such as white text on white backgrounds or microscopic fonts, containing instructions to override AI prompts and give the paper positive reviews. The peer review system, academia's safeguard against fraud, faces its own problems. Although it's meant to ensure quality, it is a slow process where new ideas need careful examination and testing. History reminds us that peer review is essential but imperfect. Albert Einstein hated it. Because the process is slow, many researchers share their findings first on pre-publication platforms, where work can be shared immediately. By the time the research reaches a legitimate science conference or journal, non peer review publications are already being distributed to the world. Waiting for the peer review process means a researcher risks missing getting credit for their discovery. The pressure to be first hasn't changed since Isaac Newton let his calculus discovery languish unpublished while Gottfried Leibniz claimed the kudos. What has changed is the scale and systematisation of shortcuts. A rise in batch retractions (ten or more papers simultaneously withdrawn) signals that we're not dealing with isolated incidents but with an industrial-scale problem. In the 1990s there were almost no batch retractions. In 2020 there were around 3,000 and over 6,000 in 2023. In comparison, in 2023 there were 2,000 single paper retractions. This means that batch retractions of more than ten papers were three times higher than single paper retractions. A path forward If this were simply about weeding out unethical scientists, the systems we already have might suffice. But we're facing a challenge to the network of checks and balances that makes science work. When fraudulent publications grow faster than legitimate science and when AI-generated content overwhelms human review capacity, we need better solutions. The scientific community must reckon with how its own structures; the publication metrics, funding mechanisms and career incentives, have created vulnerabilities that unethical systems can exploit. Until we address these systemic issues, the fraud industry will thrive, undermining the enterprise that has made our world safer, cleaner and more accessible. The question isn't whether we can afford to fix this system -- it's whether we can afford not to.

Is astronomy safe from organized scientific fraud?

Fraud in research seems to be rising and the field of astronomy could be another victim. (Image credit: Carol Yepes/Getty Images) Astronomy and space sciences have mostly avoided the fraudulent practices of paper mills and predatory journals, but that might be about to change, warn the authors of a new report that delves into the ugly machinations of criminal organizations that profit from fake science. "Because space is a huge economic priority and many countries are doubling down on space research, I would expect to see the fraudulent publishing industry expand into this area," the lead author of the report, Reese Richardson from Northwestern University, told Space.com. Worryingly, the report concludes that fraudulent science publishing is starting to outpace legitimate journals, saying that if nothing is done about this issue, it could forever pollute a wealth of scientific literature and even result in artificial intelligence (AI) being trained on made-up data. One of the prime means of assessing a scientist's career is considering what papers they've been involved with: How many papers have them as first author? How many as a co-author? How many cite their work? However, this metric appears to pave the way for some manipulative tactics. Paper mills and predatory journals prey on researchers by creating made-up papers, which are often plagiarized, full of nonsense science or describe developments so minor or low quality as to not even justify publication. They sometimes even offer authorship to researchers for prices amounting to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A paper can also be pushed through a scam peer-review process for a price to make sure it gets published in a fraudulent journal. Ultimately, the criminal organizations at the heart of this nefarious industry make millions out of scientific fraud. Sometimes the journals these fake research papers are published in are created for that monetary purpose. Other times, though, a legitimate journal can be hijacked. The newly published report on academic fraud, for instance, cites the example of the British journal HIV Nursing. It had ceased publication -- only for its domain name to be bought by a criminal organization so that a fake journal in its name could be created with the sole intent of publishing fraudulent papers from a paper mill, often on topics that had nothing to do with HIV or nursing. The most extreme cases involve these organizations infiltrating a legitimate journal, buying off staff to ease fraudulent papers through to publication. "Paper mills tend to prefer topics that are more easily exploitable," says Richardson. "For instance, there's a lot of suspected paper mill activity in materials science." In other words, if there is profit to be gained from a field such as materials sciences, medical sciences or engineering, then that makes the field vulnerable to fraudulent publications. Richardson cites the example of solar panel technology as a case in point. "One of the heavily exploited areas by paper mills is renewable energy," he said, highlighting examples of dozens of papers in this field where he found the same curves on graphs just repeated over and over, in different papers or sometimes even in the same paper, in both fraudulent publications and legitimate journals from well-regarded North American and European publishers. These copy and paste jobs are indicative of a problem that in this particular topic can hamper real research into renewable energy technology that could help us to combat the climate crisis. Yet, "Space and astronomy research is one of the areas where not a lot of paper mill activity has been detected," said Richardson. There could be several reasons for this. One is that those who seek out suspected paper mills tend to come from the scientific fields most affected by this plague of fake papers, and so they are not sufficiently familiar with astronomical subjects to recognize the fake ones. "If there is significant paper mill activity in space and astronomical research, then it's possible that it just hasn't really been detected," said Richardson. Another possibility is that space and astronomy isn't a particularly easy subject to exploit for profit. However, this could be about to change. In many developing countries where paper mills are particularly rife, the space industry is beginning to grow. This could soon begin to attract the criminal organizations looking for exploitable areas of science. To prevent this and to curtail the activities of paper mills, the report concludes that not only does there need to be greater scrutiny on journal editorial processes, but we also need smarter methods of identifying fake papers and, most revolutionary of all, a major rethink about how the scientific community incentivizes science as a career. Time is of the essence. "At some point it will be too late and scientific literature will become completely poisoned," said a co-author of the report, Luís Amaral of Northwestern University, in a statement. "We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it." The problem could also be about to grow far worse. There are already debates about legitimate scientific papers utilizing artificial intelligence, and now AI can be used by paper mills to spit out fake science ever faster. If those fraudulent papers lay undetected in the scientific literature, then they will inevitably be used to train future generations of AI, infecting them with fake scientific data that the AI will think is real, leading to AI giving bad results -- not just in generative chat apps, but also when applied to building complex climate simulations, seeking cures for diseases or modeling difficult problems. The fraudsters are poisoning the well for profit and if they're not stopped soon, then the days of being able to trust the body of scientific literature, and of having the ability to distinguish between scientific fact and scientific fake, may be coming to an end. The report was published on Aug. 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Fraud networks are flooding science journals with fake studies - Earth.com

Organized, large-scale fraud is quietly infiltrating scientific journals - and it's growing faster than legitimate research, according to a new study. Many once thought of these as isolated cases of misconduct by individual researchers, but investigators are now revealing them as a sprawling, coordinated system. It is complete with brokers, hijacked journals, and "paper mills" that churn out fake studies for profit. The researchers behind the study - led by Northwestern University - say the scale of the problem threatens to erode public trust in science unless action is taken soon. Their work combines sweeping data analysis with detailed case studies to expose how these fraudulent networks operate and why they are so difficult to stop. "Science must police itself better to preserve its integrity," said Luís A. N. Amaral, the study's senior author. "If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized. At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned." People often frame fraud in science as the story of one dishonest researcher manipulating data or plagiarizing work. But Amaral's team found something much more organized - sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities systematically working together to manipulate the publication process. "These networks are essentially criminal organizations, acting together to fake the process of science," Amaral said. "Millions of dollars are involved in these processes." The team's analysis drew on large databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, along with lists of journals removed from indexing for ethical or quality failures. They also examined records of retracted articles, image duplications, and even metadata like editor names and submission timelines. The data revealed the central role of so-called "paper mills" - operations that produce fake science research papers for paying customers. Some content fabricates information, plagiarizes text, or uses manipulated images, with certain claims being physically impossible. "More and more scientists are being caught up in paper mills," Amaral said. "Not only can they buy papers, but they can buy citations. Then, they can appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all." According to first author Reese Richardson, these businesses have multiple models but a common goal: selling prestige. "They often sell authorship slots for hundreds or even thousands of dollars," he said. "A person might pay more for the first author position or less for a fourth author position." "People can also pay to get papers they have written automatically accepted in a journal through a sham peer-review process." Amaral's group has even developed a system to detect paper mill products, including scanning for suspicious mistakes such as misidentified laboratory instruments. This method has already flagged questionable papers accepted by reputable journals. The investigation also uncovered the brokers who connect every part of the fraud pipeline: the ghostwriters, the paying authors, the willing journals, and even complicit editors. "You need to find someone to write the paper and find people willing to pay to be the authors," Amaral explained. "You need to find a journal where you can get it all published. And you need editors in that journal who will accept that paper." In some cases, fraudulent actors skip legitimate journals entirely by taking over the identity of defunct ones. This tactic, known as journal hijacking, gives their publications a veneer of credibility. "This happened to the journal HIV Nursing," Richardson said. "It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the U.K., then it stopped publishing, and its domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing, all indexed in Scopus." The researchers warn that the problem will only get worse with the rise of generative AI, which can produce convincing but false text and data at scale. "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," Richardson said. "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." To protect the credibility of science from fake research, the authors recommend stronger editorial oversight, better tools to detect fabricated work, and deeper investigation into the networks enabling fraud. They also call for reforming the incentives that drive researchers to pay for publications. "This study is probably the most depressing project I've been involved with in my entire life," Amaral said. "Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It's distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others. But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it." The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. -- - Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.