The Beta-Lactam Band and the Bogus Upsides
The @PNAS paper by Reese A. K. Richardson (Northwestern University), Spencer S. Hong (Northwestern University), Jennifer A. Byrne (University of Sydney), Luís A. Nunes Amaral (Northwestern University), “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly” is painting a worrisome picture of scientific publishing.
As the authors state, they uncovered “footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.” In other words, the form and scope of corruption is mind blowing. Many researchers, including myself, have received invitations to accept papers without review in return for a monetary or other reward. I always assumed that this approach did not work, but it is apparently working increasing well. I have also been contacted multiple times by fellow scientists who pointed out the existence of perfectly plagiarized versions of some of my papers. There again, I didn’t worry too much. But this has become common. To evade detection, these papers use “tortured phrases” such as “bogus upsides” to mean “false positives” or “Beta-Lactam Band” to mean “Beta-Lactam Group” (have you ever been to one of their concerts?); they “repurpose” and slightly modify images from other (serious) papers.
Paper mills, basically criminal organizations that “that sell mass-produced low quality and fabricated research articles”, are on their way to outpacing actual scientific publications. Perhaps the most disturbing finding to me, from the authors’ sophisticated exploration and network analyses, is that even some of the best journals are not immune to the corruption, as suggested by “Anomalous Patterns in the Editorial Handling of Problematic Publications”.
This is no longer a fringe issue in science. It is threatening the core of the entire scientific endeavor, where progress comes from shared discoveries. With an increasing reliance on AI to explore science literature, we not only have to worry about hallucinations (to be fair, checking that references do exist should be a low bar) but about fraud as well. Some dedicated AI for Science tools are already assigning reputation ratings to citations, which comes with a mixed bag of consequences but seems to be necessary. But in many cases I have seen a retracted paper still being cited by that AI. Keeping track of retractions should be a priority for these chatbots.
The paper, which is Open Access, has many other insights worth exploring -including drastic differences between disciplines. It is a strong wake-up call for scientists as well as established publishing houses.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2420092122
https://pubpeer.com/publications/0169B1F41428075F52DFBF0E063A20