British journals forced to retract fake Chinese science papers

• By RHYS BLAKELY
• THE TIMES
• OCTOBER 1, 2022

Hundreds of fake scientific papers from Chinese researchers have been published in British journals, prompting warnings of “industrialised cheating”.

The publishing arm of the Institute of Physics, a society founded in London in 1874, has been forced to retract nearly 900 papers so far this year. At least 497 of them were claimed to have been written by Chinese researchers, on topics ranging from chemical engineering to artificial intelligence. Others were meant to be from scientists in India and Iran.

In reality, the papers had been churned out by “paper mills”, shadowy operations that produce falsified research to order and arrange to have it published in western journals.

To be named as an author of a paper costs from $US500 (about $780) to $US5000, depending on the calibre of the journal and how prominently your name is to appear, experts say. The services were being advertised yesterday (Friday) on Facebook.

Springer Nature, a German-British academic publisher, is another victim. It said it had retracted 749 studies in the past nine months which it now believed came from paper mills.

All of the retracted papers were supposed to have gone through the peer-review process, where work is vetted by scientists who work in that field.

“We’ve been infiltrated,” said Chris Graf, research integrity director at Springer Nature. “Our decades-old approaches to ensuring quality have been screwed with by people who are determined to not play by the rules. So now we need to respond to that.”

A recent report from the Committee on Publication Ethics, a non-profit organisation that works to combat fraudulent research, suggested that one in 50 papers submitted to journals now come from paper mills. The problem “threatens to overwhelm the editorial processes of a significant number of journals”, it said.

One factor appears to be junior staff at Chinese hospitals having to publish research to advance their careers. Many of the papers retracted by IOP Publishing were first spotted by Nick Wise, an engineering graduate student at the University of Cambridge.

Paper mills frequently stitch together passages taken from genuine studies to produce fake research. To dodge the software that is used to detect plagiarism, they rephrase them. The results are often bizarre: the term “breast cancer” has, for instance, been changed to “bosom peril”, while “artificial intelligence” was changed to “counterfeit consciousness”. Wise identified the fake papers by searching for these “tortured phrases”.

This method was pioneered by Professor Guillaume Cabanac, of the University of Toulouse, who believes the papers that have been retracted so far represent the tip of the iceberg. “You cannot trust these papers,” he said.

Isaac Newton said researchers make progress by standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, Cabanac added. “If you stand on the shoulders of fraudsters, what can you achieve with that?”

The tactics used to get fake research published have included creating false online personas claiming to be legitimate scientists. These appear to vouch for the bogus papers.

The papers retracted by the IOP were supposed to have been presented at conferences that carry the institute’s name but are organised by third parties.

The third parties should have arranged for the papers to be peer-reviewed but this step either failed to spot the fakes or was skipped. One publisher said he was aware of a “fake conference”, an event that never happened but which still produced papers that became part of the scientific record.

Kim Eggleton, head of peer review at IOP Publishing, said: “We are committed to stopping misconduct. Academic publishing has for a long time been based on trust. That trust is being undermined by paper mills, so we are investing heavily in closely scrutinising submitted content as well as editor, author and reviewer behaviour.”