Science: Fake papers
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Reporting on the prevalence of fraudulent scientific papers and paper mills reveals systemic vulnerabilities in academic integrity that parallel concerns about AI-generated misinformation and the difficulty of detecting sophisticated falsifications at scale.
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Fake scientific papers have become alarmingly prevalent in academia, with estimates suggesting up to 34% of neuroscience papers and 24% of medicine papers published in 2020 may be fabricated or plagiarized—far exceeding the 2% baseline from 2010. Paper mills, secretive businesses that sell fake papers to researchers seeking to inflate publication records, have exploited academia's "publish or perish" culture and the lack of robust detection mechanisms. While new detection tools show promise in identifying fraudulent manuscripts through indicators like suspicious email addresses and institutional affiliations, they face challenges including high false-positive rates. Publishers and the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers are developing detection methods and launching initiatives like the Integrity Hub to combat this growing threat to scientific integrity.
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# Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
## But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture
- 9 May 2023
- 4:45 PM ET
- By [Jeffrey Brainard](https://www.science.org/content/author/jeffrey-brainard "Jeffrey Brainard")
SARA GIRONI CARNEVALE
[Table of contents](https://www.science.org/toc/science/380/6645)
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 380, Issue 6645. [Download PDF](https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adi6513 "")
When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report [in a medRxiv preprint](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.06.23289563v1) posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in [a 2022 publishers’ group report](https://doi.org/10.24318/jtbG8IHL).
“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”
His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or [undeserved authorship](https://www.science.org/content/article/russian-website-peddles-authorships-linked-reputable-journals). “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: [It shut down four of its journals](https://www.hindawi.com/post/evolving-our-portfolio-response-integrity-challenges/) it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.
Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn’t a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues.
Still, the detectors raise hopes for gaining
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