Fake Science Marches On

This is a problem, but the article doesn't address the underlying issues. Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

You can go read the details of the "Paper Mills" that churn out vast amounts of "research papers" that are bogus. And there seems to be some AI involved, though most of it isn't that sophisticated.

Why? Well the article only touches on it, but it because researchers are under tremendous pressure to publish. You have have to get a lot of articles in various publications in order to get grants, to get jobs, to get anything in research. And so the Paper Mills will help you do that, for a price.

For Wiley, which publishes more than 2,000 journals, the problem came to light two years ago, shortly after it paid nearly $300 million for Hindawi, a company founded in Egypt in 1997 that included about 250 journals. In 2022, a little more than a year after the purchase, scientists online noticed peculiarities in dozens of studies from journals in the Hindawi family.

Click thru for the details.