Digital magic, or the dark arts of the 21^stcentury—how can journals and peer reviewers detect manuscripts and publications from paper mills?

Abstract

In recent years, it has been proposed that unrealistic requirements for academics and medical doctors to publish in scientific journals, combined with monetary publication rewards, have led to forms of contract cheating offered by organizations known as paper mills. Paper mills are alleged to offer products ranging from research data through to ghostwritten fraudulent or fabricated manuscripts and submission services. While paper mill operations remain poorly understood, it seems likely that paper mills need to balance product quantity and quality, such that they produce or contribute to large numbers of manuscripts that will be accepted for publication. Producing manuscripts at scale may be facilitated by the use of manuscript templates, which could give rise to shared features such as textual and organizational similarities, the description of highly generic study hypotheses and experimental approaches, digital images that show evidence of manipulation and/or reuse, and/or errors affecting verifiable experimental reagents. Based on these features, we propose practical steps that editors, journal staff, and peer reviewers can take to recognize and respond to research manuscripts and publications that may have been produced with undeclared assistance from paper mills.

Analysis of Retractions from Hospitals in Mainland China from 2017-2019

“…A third party provided the same results to two research teams, and the articles of both teams solved the same research questions and reported the same data, results, and conclusions (29). Recent investigations have suggested the presence of paper mills (30). They use manuscript templates to produce a lot of similar articles, regular and similar results pictures, and submit these articles to various journals for his client.…”

Paper mills and on-demand publishing: Risks to the integrity of journal indexing and metrics

“…Within this backdrop, the issue of paper mills, 3 which are paid services that provide made-to-order “scientific papers”, data, ghost-writing or other suspect services that give academics unfair gains, for a price, needs to be emphasized. When an individual orders data from a paper mill, for example a data set or a figure (graph, plot, etc.…”

“…In the worst-case scenarios, radical elements that have benefitted or profited from paper mills should face criminalization. 5 Editors and journals that were genuinely unwittingly victimized, and blind-sighted by the elaborate ability of dishonest authors to defraud them, should consider investing in forensic image software 3 because such journals have become “soft targets”.…”

Publishing ethics in the era of paper mills

“…The emerging truth from these community efforts is uncomfortable; it appears that misconduct when publishing scientific research runs much deeper than the occasional ‘sting’ operation. Moreover, it appears that fabricated research papers are readily available for purchase by scientists driven by the need to publish more papers to further their careers (see Byrne and Christopher, 2020 ).…”

“…Figures within accepted articles are checked by trained in-house production staff for evidence of image manipulation. Byrne and Christopher ( Byrne and Christopher, 2020 ) have identified two types of fraudulent images: invented images and stock images. Invented images are typically western blots, and might include placing individual bands onto false backgrounds, non-linear adjustments, the splicing of multiple images to suggest they come from the same gel, duplicated bands and lanes, and grouping or consolidation of the data (e.g.…”