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On-demand papers had jeopardized the credibility of hundreds of research investigations in areas as sensitive as endocrinology or vascular surgery.
The Publish or perish culture has resulted in unsustainable production conditions in higher education. There is constant pressure on academicians to publish research to stay employed. This has caused researchers to carry out practices that compromise the quality of their studies, and in some cases, their integrity. Such is the case of paper mills, potentially criminal organizations that produce scientific manuscripts on-demand and made by ghostwriters.
These groups’ interest is purely economic, so they do not care about following the codes of ethics necessary to validate academic work. Some might even have labs that run experiments and produce real data and images. Scientists and academics can buy this data to use in different experiments, while others buy work and research already ready for publication. Their most frequent clients are people who want to publish without going through a complete research process. Why does paper mill lab production not have the quality of real academic work? Usually, both the data and the results from these organizations are prefabricated or plagiarized.
The problem has been accentuated by the “publish or perish” culture and the publishing pressures accelerated by the pandemic. The resulting ethics violations have generated sufficient concern within the scientific community to create guides and protocols to detect this dishonest practice and retract its consequential products.
The effort to stop dishonest academic production
In the latest years, the scientific community made the manufacture of work a top priority to safeguard academia’s integrity. A single paper mill can produce more than 400 false research works in fields as critical as cardiology, endocrinology, and vascular surgery. By March 2021, more than a thousand studies had already been identified as possible products of this practice.
Editors of scientific journals and magazines have already turned to committees such as COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) to discuss the systemic manipulation of scientific production by unethical manufacturers of work. Among the most important topics under consideration are the methods to detect this type of academic fraud and the protocols to prevent them.
Academic detectives
Confronted with the need for rapid detection of manuscripts from paper mills, more experts are taking on the task of becoming detectives for academic integrity, and they are succeeding in discovering fabricated works. According to an analysis by the magazine Nature, about 26% of the articles reported by detection experts have been listed and categorized as untrustworthy. Meanwhile, the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry (JCB) has retracted 23 of 137 articles having alleged image manipulation. It was also discovered that China experienced one of the highest peaks in manufactured papers in recent years, most coming from the country’s hospitals.
When delivering research to an institution or journal means the continuity of a researcher’s career or sufficient income to secure housing or transportation, the reason why paper mills have become such a pervasive problem is evident. What do you think is the impact of manufactured works on the quality of academic production? What measures or resources do you think can be generated to detect the work from paper mills and prevent their use? Tell us in the comments section.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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