The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Richardson, Reese A. K.; Hong, Spencer S.; Byrne, Jennifer A.; Stoeger, Thomas; Amaral, Luis A. Nunes
• 署名单位: Northwestern University; Northwestern University; Northwestern University; University of Sydney; Northwestern University; Northwestern University; Northwestern University; Feinberg School of Medicine; Northwestern University; Northwestern University
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-14752
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2420092122
• 发表日期: 2025-08-04
• 关键词: research misconduct; CHINA; COMPETITION; JUSTICE; IMPACT

摘要

Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos-i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce-the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities-paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions-that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.