Offline, Bimler is a retired psychologist previously associated with Massey University. Online, he’s Smut Clyde, one of a growing community of scientist “sleuths” scouring journals for suspicious data.
“I think science needs more of an immune system,” he says. “We are the unpaid, unofficial immune system to deal with this infection.”
Sleuths are the force behind a sharp rise in rates of article retractions in biomedicine, drawing attention to what experts are calling an epidemic of research fraud. According to the science journal Nature, in 2023 more than 10,000 articles were pulled – up from 4000 the previous year. Last month, publisher John Wiley & Sons announced the closure of 19 science journals, many so riddled with fraud they couldn’t be salvaged. Bimler and a group of sleuths were behind the unmasking of almost 300 fake papers in just two “special issue” journals from Wiley’s now-shuttered Hindawi imprint. Wiley warned investors about revenue losses of as much as US$40 million as a result of the closures.
“It’s a very painful time for science,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch and distinguished journalist in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Oransky points out that not all retractions are due to fraud. Some are the result of genuine errors. He says many more, however, “are literally making a false claim in the scientific record”.
The Covid-19 pandemic raised awareness of misinformation in biomedicine, Oransky says. He sees two factors driving the increase in outright fraud: increased pressure on researchers to publish more and collect citations to boost their own and their institutions’ rankings, and paper mills.
“These are shady operations that make fake papers and sell authorship. All of the things you need in order to succeed as an academic and in order to get a job and grants and everything like that.”
Paper mills flood niche subject areas with low-quality and dubious research, taking advantage of a peer review system built on unpaid labour and good faith. For a fee, they will generate a research article in the client’s name and see it through to publication in an academic journal. In return, the client gets a competitive edge in an industry built on an imperative to “publish or perish”.
Paper mills have been on the radar of sleuths since the academic journal Science published a 2013 exposé revealing the extent of the underground industry.
While the scale of the problem is still unknown, paper mills are not hard to find – most solicit researchers directly via email.
Increasingly AI tools are being used to churn out fake papers. A diagram of spermatogonial stem cells in rats published in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology went viral earlier in the year for its wildly disproportionate depiction of rat genitalia accompanied with gibberish labels. It was posted on X with the caption, “Erm, how did Figure 1 get past a peer reviewer?!” The publisher retracted the article the following day.
Biomedicine appears to be particularly susceptible to fraud, with one study finding a fourfold increase in retractions over the 20 years to 2021. Bimler says much of this comes down to recent advancements in our understanding of long non-coding RNAs, “the dark matter of cell biology”, which opened up new possibilities for cancer research. This field is rife with falsified datasets or, at worst, fake breakthroughs with irreplicable results that threaten to derail the costly and time-consuming work of real cancer researchers.
“A lot of peer reviewers are really taking the author’s word for it that methods are legitimate and published images look the way images should look,” says Bimler. “We’ve always taken for granted that research is sincere.”
According to the Committee on Publication Ethics, only about 2 per cent of papers submitted to a journal will be fake. However, once a paper slips through to publication, the proportion submitted to that journal will rise to 46 per cent. The published fakes join an estimated three to four million scientific articles produced every year, effectively hiding in plain sight.
The true extent of the fraud epidemic is unknown, as the retraction data represent only instances that have been detected. Further, Oransky says the lack of a clear villain makes it harder for the public to take the risks seriously.
“The more pernicious and long-term problem is the hollowing out of trust and what should be a trustworthy system,” says Oransky. “You’re polluting the scientific record.”
In May, sleuths contacted Professor Marcel Dinger, dean of science at the University of Sydney and one of Australia’s foremost experts in genome biology, who has published 166 papers. They had noticed an oddity in five he had co-authored between 2020 and 2022. All five articles were reviews pertaining to new findings in long non-coding RNAs and micro-RNAs and their applications in cancer treatment – ranging from melanoma to breast cancer. The problem was a number of the articles being reviewed mentioned retracted research.
Dinger tells The Saturday Paper he and his co-authors were shocked by the extent to which fraudulent papers had inadvertently infiltrated their research – across the five articles, 38 references had been pulled. In one paper alone, about 7 per cent of the research cited was from papers found to be illegitimate.
For Bimler, cases like this are the crux of the problem of paper mills: fake research becomes “part of the broader literature. They build a fine impression of a framework of knowledge which doesn’t actually exist.”
Compounding this problem is that in the years since Dinger’s co-authored papers had been published, they had gone on collectively to be cited more than 100 times, mostly in cancer research.
Oransky says when retracted research gets cited, it creates ripple effects for future work in the field.
“Anyone who bases their future research on that,” Oransky says, “is going to get very frustrated and they’re probably going to be told ‘it’s your fault’.” He has spoken to scientists who have become discouraged and left the profession as a result.
“And this costs money … resources [that] could’ve been dedicated elsewhere.”
Even after the papers are retracted, many remain in circulation. In some cases, the retracted status was not made immediately clear by the publisher.
Oransky says for decades publishers have been slow to act on fraud detected within their journals. “They really tried everything they could to deny the problems were real or that they were significant.”
While greater transparency and accountability from publishers could help legitimate researchers from recycling fake science, tackling paper mills themselves is a different problem. Tiger BB8, a clinical researcher working in the United States, is tracking their rise in China.
“China as a whole is getting a very bad reputation for biomedical research,” says the Chinese national, who was drawn to sleuthing from a love of detective stories. They prefer to remain anonymous after Chinese police briefly detained an associate who published one of their reports into medical research misconduct.
China’s publication of science papers now exceeds that of the US, at last count totalling about 23 per cent of the global output of science research. China is also a world leader in retractions, along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. In China’s case, Tiger says, the underbelly of fraud is directly linked to the administrative structure of the hospitals where, unlike in Australian hospitals, research publications are required in order to advance from junior doctor to more senior levels of practice.
“Which is so weird to me because if you’re a good doctor, you don’t need to be a good researcher, right? Not every doctor is a good scientist,” Tiger says. “But China’s system is forcing physicians to publish. And then you can imagine the caseload for how many patients they see each day.”
Working with other sleuths, Tiger uncovered roughly 640 papers linked to a paper mill catering to hospitals in China, all reusing the same patterns of data falsification. Once the sleuths have identified these mills, however, there is little they can do. Tiger says reporting to Chinese authorities is “the least successful route” when it comes to accountability. “I probably got feedback on less than a handful [of cases]. They reply to me, ‘Okay, we’re looking into it’, but there’s nothing further.”
There is no easy way to purge fraudulent research from the system. In Australia, universities are left to self-regulate with only the occasional, extreme case of research misconduct going to criminal court. Last year, the former commissioner for South Australia’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, Bruce Lander, called for the creation of a national watchdog into research integrity, and for the Australian Research Council to be given legislative powers to police research misconduct. It’s unclear how this body could tackle overseas paper mills.
Professor Dinger tells The Saturday Paper he’s working with the journal publishers and is currently “awaiting their advice in terms of what options are available to notify readers of the articles in those papers that cite papers that have since been retracted.”
Tiger BB8 believes academics need more awareness of fake science. Tiger says students can be taught ways to spot a fake paper. A spokesperson for the University of Sydney tells The Saturday Paper students undergo mandatory training on best practice and multimedia training is offered to help students “identify and avoid poor practices such as participating in paper mills”.
Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky recommends addressing the root cause of the problem: the academic environment of “publish or perish”. Oransky wants to see a shift in the metrics by which research and the people who create it are valued.
“Rankings, it’s just the rankings. Honestly,” Oransky says. “Citations are overrepresented in terms of metrics, and they’re easy to game. And in order to get cited, you have to get published. So all the incentives point in a certain direction.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
June 29, 2024 as “Dark scientific mills”.
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