Trust the Science? Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

According to an article posted by Science.org, "Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common.

"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.

“'It is just too hard to believe' at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if 'somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.'

"His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. 'Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,' says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were 'heavily compromised' by articles from paper mills."

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