Do you want to publish an article in a scientific journal? easy. Pay a few hundred dollars and get an item ready to ship. Portrait of the pseudoscience industry plaguing the research world
The phenomenon of scientific articles from companies that specialize in scientific misrepresentation (material mills or paper mills) is increasingly prevalent
By Philippe Robitaille Grow for “La Presse”
His name is David Pemler. But he’s also known by his detective alias, Smoot Clyde. A retired psychology researcher at Massey University in New Zealand, he is now a master in the art of scientific fraud detection.
Recently, articles published in some chemistry journals have attracted his attention. His favorite subject: metal-organic lattices (MOFs), which are chemical compounds primarily used to store gas. According to this research, MOFs would reduce inflammation and kill cancer cells.
There was a snake under the rock.
The images and phrases were strangely similar from article to article. The references cited were often unrelated to the content of the texts.
Some of these items have already been identified as suspicious by researchers. So I started looking for other questionable posts on this topic. And everything collapsed.
David Pemmler, retired psychology researcher
In a pre-publication study, David Bimler lists more than 800 articles on MOFs, supposedly coming from the same scientific falsification firm. These companies are called matter factories, or Paper mills . They sell their articles, often stuffed with fabricated experiment results, to researchers desperate for scientific publications in their name.
This phenomenon is becoming increasingly widespread. “It is difficult to estimate the total number of articles published from these plants, but I would say there are at least 100,000 in the scientific literature,” Jennifer Byrne, a professor of molecular oncology at the University of Sydney, Australia, tells Scientific Investigations.
The professor adds, “It is difficult for these companies to publish their articles in reputable journals.” But some will almost certainly succeed in doing so.
Post at any cost
Article factories target environments where researchers are under high pressure to publish. In the medical sector, especially in China, these companies abound.
“In China, all scientific recognition of researchers depends on the number of publications,” explains Vincent Larivière, professor of information sciences at the University of Montreal. “They can’t be promoted if they don’t publish a certain number of articles in certain journals. In Canada it’s not like that, so there’s not much of a problem here.” in Article factories.
Other regions such as Russia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe are also fertile grounds for these companies, which offer their services to searchers on social networks or directly via email.
A lot of people make a lot of money from it, and it disgusts me. We are talking here, among other things, about cancer research. They should be used to develop better treatments for patients, not enrich them.
Jennifer Byrne, Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Sydney
International Publisher LLC is one company whose fraudulent activities have been repeatedly denounced by the scientific community. On the website of the company based in Russia, a list of ready-to-publish articles for sale is presented. For each article, the site gives a brief description and indicates the price it costs to appear as first author, second author, etc.
La Presse I tried to reach International Publisher LLC via email for a comment. The company did not respond.
The evil is in the details
“Essays from these factories are often written in a very believable way,” says Jennifer Byrne. And the peer review system isn’t perfect. It is not designed to detect this type of mass fraud.
To find the papers that got away, David Pimler and Jennifer Byrne collaborated privately with Elizabeth Beck, a California microbiologist-turned-scientific-integrity expert.
Using software, the researcher identifies duplicate images from one scholarly publication to another, one of the trademarks of article factories. Various tags also act as indicators of suspicious searches: email addresses of authors that do not match their names, redundant phrases, certain graphic styles that are distinctive, and so on.
“You have to be aware of the little mistakes that come up,” she says. For example, I read an article by Hospital A that mistakenly mentioned Hospital B, which was in another city and had no connection with Hospital A. Searching, I found eight articles from different hospitals with the same sentence. It is likely that they wrote from the same form, forgetting to correct these details.
Elizabeth Beck fears, however, that these signs of fraud will eventually become very difficult to detect.
Item factories can use artificial intelligence, which gives increasingly convincing results. Among other things, they can create very realistic images of scientific experiments.
Elizabeth Beck, microbiologist
According to the American researcher, journal editors will need to be more attentive to this industry, which undermines the credibility of real research. Elizabeth Beck would also like to see strict measures taken in countries like China and Russia to prevent these companies from advertising online.
In addition to these solutions, a great deal of thought is needed about the conditions that allowed such a phenomenon to emerge, insists Vincent Lariviere, of the University of Montreal. He concludes, “Governments that have purely quantitative policies on scientific publishing should recognize that there are more harmful than positive effects.” This is where you should play. We must stop pressuring researchers to publish even when they have nothing to say. »
Some discoveries of alleged plant substances in medicine
The tadpole factory
In 2020, a team including Jennifer Byrne and another including David Pemler and Elizabeth Beck simultaneously identified a number of questionable publications from Chinese hospitals. In approximately 600 papers, western blot images, a technique used to detect proteins, are artificially designed to be clean and have similar shapes resembling tadpoles.
Factory stock photos
Also in 2020, Elizabeth Beck published 121 articles, the majority of which were published in the journal European Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences (ERMPS). They use the same images, applying rotations, reflections or color changes, to describe their experiences.
gene factories
In 2021 Jennifer Byrne and her colleagues are reviewing articles published in two journals where suspicious publications have been reported in the past: gene And Oncology Reports . Of the 12,000 articles studied, more than 700 describe genetic sequences that contain errors. “We can’t say that all of these publications come from material factories, but that seems to be the case for many of them,” Jennifer Byrne assesses.
This text was originally written in French and was published by La Presse. [Aqui!].
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