[Ed] Fake Scientific Papers - Scary Numbers

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

Not good:

Quote:

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

However:

Quote:

Day sees some hope: Flagging journals suspected of being targeted by paper mills can quickly deter additional fraudulent submissions. He points to his analysis of journals that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) put on a public list because of suspicions they contained paper mill papers. His company’s Papermill Alarm detector showed that before the CAS list came out, suspicious papers made up the majority of some journals’ content; afterward, the proportion dropped to nearly zero within months (see chart). (Papermill Alarm flags potentially fraudulent papers based on telltale patterns revealed when a paper mill repeatedly submits papers; the company does not publicly disclose what these signs are.) Journals could drive a similar crash by using automated detectors to flag suspicious manuscripts, nudging paper mills to take them elsewhere, Day says.

Not good for science and society.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/IsNHS0m