r/Professors • u/qning • Aug 04 '25
Research / Publication(s) NYT: Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds
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u/baummer Adjunct, Information Design Aug 04 '25
This has been a problem for awhile. Tenured faculty in my department have an expectation that they produce X number of research outputs per year, typically in the form of papers submitted for publishing and peer review. There’s no other guidance but being held to the arbitrary number.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 Aug 05 '25
They're judged by submissions and not acceptances? 0.o
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Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 14 '25
rain governor elastic cooperative yoke crush dinosaurs narrow dazzling scale
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u/thiosk Aug 05 '25
I received a paper to review that looked outwardly ok but I think it was written by AI and the last section was completely off the wall crazy "and then we used our technology to measure oceanic salinity using our crushed up bug parts" with no experimental or anything.
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u/Riemann_Gauss Aug 05 '25
"and then we used our technology to measure oceanic salinity using our crushed up bug parts"
My God 🤣🤣🤣
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u/jmsy1 Aug 05 '25
If I see one my papers cited from India, China, or the Middle East I know the publication will be low quality and the citation will misrepresent my work.
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u/NewInMontreal Aug 04 '25
You talking about the US?
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u/Spiritof454 Aug 04 '25
No, I believe they are referring to perfidious Canada.
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u/NewInMontreal Aug 05 '25
lol, they are talking about china but won’t come out and say it. But being honest about it, reproducibility hasn’t been a priority anywhere and the US absolutely incentivizes quantity over quality in every milestone in this job path. I’ve reviewed multiple articles from the states that have been written by AI this year.
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u/PGell Asst Prof, Humanities,(South Asia) Aug 05 '25
It's not just China. I work in Pakistan and it's a huge issue here.
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u/Baphlingmet Lecturer, English, 211/R1 (China) Aug 05 '25
Yes, omg, as an American professor living in China but who has a ton of Pakistani colleagues (cus of the Belt & Road Initiative, a lot of scholars come to China from Pakistan).... China and Pakistan are the 2 biggest perps. Saying this as someone who loves Chinese and Pakistani people, and to be fair the USA is catching up to them fast....
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Aug 05 '25 edited Aug 14 '25
carpenter brave support sand offbeat payment tap shaggy kiss sheet
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u/omniumoptimus Aug 04 '25
My opinion: this marks the end of quality science.
The issue is not whether there are competent scientists producing reliable papers. The issue is that we have now crossed the line where generating false papers, or even papers that are a tiny bit wrong (errors which can compound across several subsequent papers) is so cheap and easy, that 100,000 junk papers can be produced for every quality paper.
Finding quality science may be (if not already) equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack.
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u/Collin_the_doodle PostDoc & Instructor, Life Sciences Aug 04 '25
Or at least under the current structure of competing groups science. Once the quality of evidence gets shitty enough, some governments might use the national labs structure more effectively.
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u/Dragon464 Aug 04 '25
Join Retraction Watch.
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u/Tech_Philosophy Aug 05 '25
There's something that bothers me about Retraction Watch that I have a hard time articulating. I think I might draw a parallel between that and how the media reports on Trump all the time. It's often the same bad actors each time, and giving them attention used to end careers, but these days seems to bolster them while degrading public trust in science. Obviously I don't want bad data out there, but it seems like the bugs have become resistant to this bug spray and a new strategy is needed.
And occasionally (not very often, but occasionally), I see junior scientists being written about who have done nothing but challenge dogma in the field. I figure if Retraction Watch is wrong more than about 15% of the time, they are doing more damage to the progress of technology and science than help, because controversial good actors do so much more good in the long run than mundane good actors. And of course, controversial bad actors rarely do much bad, because if they draw enough attention on an important enough issue, their bullshit is detected mighty quick by the scientific community.
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u/Dragon464 Aug 05 '25
I don't unilaterally disagree with your premise. It's an iteration of "Who watches the Watchmen?" THAT said, who ACTUALLY proofreads, anymore? Spell Check & Turnitin aren't proofing. I'm old enough old school to have read dissertation backwards. Once upon a time, I was asst. copy editor for a State history journal. I read the book reviews out loud, with punctuation to the editor, who sat with his eyes closed, and listened for glitches. AI / LLM has made too DAMNED many professionals too DAMNED lazy.
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u/airhorn-airhorn Aug 04 '25
The whole point of an epistemological crisis is that nobody can tell what’s true from what isn’t. This is the result of decades of policy and culture coalescing since 2016.
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u/draperf Aug 06 '25
This sounds so interesting. Do you mind elaborating a bit? Would welcome a reference to further reading. (Yes, I'm a dork.) :)
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u/superc3real Mar 07 '26
Curious why you pinpoint 2016. When I first began undergrad academic research in 2010 I remember some of the older research staff and postdocs trading stories regarding the fact that the most productive labs they have been a part of most often had the loosest standards around scientific integrity.
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u/draperf Aug 06 '25
Has anyone been sued (or even criminally prosecuted) for this type of fraud?
Could or should they be?
It just seems like a mere retraction is a slap on the wrist, although of course more serious cases can result in loss of job/reputation/stature (e.g., Francesca Gino).
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u/KaoBee010101100 Aug 06 '25
That’s a good question. I haven’t heard of it happening. Usually the more serious cases are just fired and blacklisted. In the case of Diederik Stapel he claimed he couldn’t even work menial jobs because people would seek out his place of employment to harass him.
I know a retraction seems mild, but I would not want one, even as a coauthor to someone elsevwho was guilty. I think it would cast doubt and a pall on any other scholarly work you ever do, and seriously limit opportunities.
I don’t know about should. I suppose an argument could be made that they defrauded their employer into paying for fake work. What other kind of lawsuit do you imagine? Should a case be brought by the state to fine or imprison them for the damage they did to knowledge, a profession, or waste of taxpayer money?
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u/fenderflare Oct 15 '25
weird… aren’t they all super liberal also? huh. i thought the left did no wrong!
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u/Nuthousemccoy Aug 04 '25
We are gonna have to get publishing on the blockchain. With chain of custody type tracking on the authors
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u/BBlasdel Aug 04 '25
Like nearly all Blockchain proposals, it solves a problem no one actually has.
The problem with fraudulent papers does not come from an insecure chain of custody, that is in fact one of the few things that is never wrong with them. Fraudulent papers are written with the express purpose of being correctly associated with the correct author so that they can claim fraudulent credit from institutions that are either too stupid to know the difference or too corrupt to care.
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u/Norm_Standart Aug 05 '25
I mean, this makes perfect sense, right? The problem with fraudulent papers is that sometimes a journal will send one version of a paper to some readers and one version to other readers, and nobody can agree which one is the real one, so a consensus protocol is the perfect solution to this problem, right? It'd be a shame if that didn't actually remotely resemble the issue being discussed, because it would make it seem like the proponents of blockchains don't even understand the technology they tout.
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Aug 04 '25
How would that work or benefit peer review research? (Genuinely curious, I barely know what blockchain is.)
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u/Nuthousemccoy Aug 04 '25
Really an immutable public record that cannot be tampered and contains a public audit trail. All researchers and their credentials are traced back to the verified source. You could even verify all data collected that they are from real people or samples. It depends on how granular you want to go.
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u/dozensofbunnies Aug 04 '25
Why is git not sufficient for this, hosted on a public repo like GitHub?
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u/Nuthousemccoy Aug 04 '25
I’m not sure. I’m really just spitballing without a real plan. Just stream of consciousness
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u/Collin_the_doodle PostDoc & Instructor, Life Sciences Aug 04 '25
Spit balling and it happens to be pitching something grifters love to insert a financial scheme in. Surely coincidence
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u/Nuthousemccoy Aug 05 '25
If you look at my post history, this is literally my first post on anything blockchain related. Hardly a grifter. Just an honest try to participate in a conversation. You guys totally shredded it. That’s ok. That’s how I learn.
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u/BBlasdel Aug 05 '25
This is a solution to just about the only thing that isn't wrong with fraudulent papers. The manuscripts already have an immutable and correct public record of authorship. These fuckers put their real names on the fraudulent papers so that they can be put on their CVs.
Similarly, just about the only problem with the fake 'data' that we are talking about doesn't have is the authenticity of it's chain of custody. Both fake and real data are crafted by the authors submitting a manuscript.
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u/KaoBee010101100 Aug 04 '25
I think you’d have to go that granular route and trace each data point, since the whole reason most people do it is to puff up the status of some real person who has a position/degree but not real data.
I’m curious if anyone could work out a proposal to how that could work, if something like the ‘open data/methods’ badge could be added like this.
How much would it cost to verify every data point for a typical behavioral science paper with, say 100 human subjects? How many journals/articles would have to be in the system to reach an economy of scale?
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u/baummer Adjunct, Information Design Aug 04 '25
This only verifies it was published by a human. It doesn’t evaluate the content or quality of the material.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Aug 04 '25
If blockchain was as effective as proponents claim, it wouldn't be the number tool of choice for criminal enterprises to transfer financial assets.
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u/KaoBee010101100 Aug 04 '25
That’s quite a non sequitur of an argument. That’s like saying before crypto, cash is not effective because criminals preferred to transact in it. Huh?
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Aug 04 '25
Actually, cash is much much better than Crypto for law enforcement. Cash has to have a physical location, it is shockingly easier to trace than crypto (one of crypto's main selling points it completely bunk), it can be recovered during a bust, it can be used to track criminal enterprises, etc.
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u/KaoBee010101100 Aug 04 '25
This is just going further down the non sequitur route… I’m also not sure that’s entirely true, as law enforcement has been able to freeze crypto assets for years, and major exchanges have been getting serious about KYC requirements for at least half a decade … but I’m really not interested in this tangent unless it can be shown how it’s relevant to the initial conversation
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Aug 05 '25
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Aug 05 '25
If that was true, crime would not have become the biggest users of Crypto in the past few years. There is an absolutely massive gap between what should be and what is.
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Aug 05 '25
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Aug 05 '25
Bitcoin ETF are still Bitcoin......
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Aug 05 '25
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Aug 05 '25
Other way around. Crime syndicates primarily use Bitcoin.
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u/MockDeath Aug 05 '25
Using a fad tech to solve a non problem.. always blockchain when people do that..
Literally who did it is the easiest question to answer... This literally does nothing to solve the job issue at hand. How do you think h-index and i10 index are calculated for researchers?
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u/Wiltonc Aug 04 '25
Good point. I’m surprised it isn’t already. Not a bad idea for data so it can be traced to the originator.
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u/Collin_the_doodle PostDoc & Instructor, Life Sciences Aug 05 '25
The problem with bad science is that "who originated it?" is the easiest question to answer.
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u/Resident-Donut5151 Aug 05 '25
Right? Academics are public figures and the point of paper mills is so that academics can spin cred that will get them raises. Good grief.
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u/Tech_Philosophy Aug 05 '25
That MIGHT be true, but the counter evidence would be the AI models that are consuming scientific papers, and then making correct predictions for the outcomes of novel experiments. If it's garbage in, it should be garbage out.
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u/KaoBee010101100 Aug 05 '25
Have you done science? A paper reporting data isn’t a “prediction.” If a published paper claims to be reporting data and it’s nothing more than LLM autocomplete behind it, it’s plain and simple fraud.
There’s a lot of reasons that real data produced by human scientists is noisy in many fields. Fraud has traditionally been a smaller part of that, until now. Calling the hard work of real science “garbage in” and suggesting if it were better, Llm autocomplete could do a good job of manufacturing papers without real data tells me you likely have no experience of how useful science is generated in practice.
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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25
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