When cancer research is distorted by rising tide of fake scientific studies
Perverse incentive system in science is making it harder to weed out fraud and AI-enabled paper mills.
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Paper mills have proliferated because of a pathology that has afflicted many areas of science.
PHOTO: PIXABAY
F.D. Flam
Faking it until you make it may be a common practice in some careers. But it’s clearly unethical for scientists and medical researchers. All the same thousands of fake papers are churned out by so-called paper mills and published every year, many of them in peer-reviewed journals.
The issue made headlines recently when Wiley, a respected publishing house, announced it would be dropping 19 of its journals associated with a publisher they had acquired, called Hindawi, in part because they were infested with fake papers.
