The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly 2025 Richardson et al.

[Jaybee00]

Significance​

Numerous recent scientific and journalistic investigations demonstrate that systematic scientific fraud is a growing threat to the scientific enterprise. In large measure this has been attributed to organizations known as research paper mills. We uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards. Our analysis reveals insights into how such organizations are structured and how they operate.

Abstract​

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.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

 

[Jaybee00]

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds​

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html?unlocked_article_code=1.b08.6wdk.S7Bz3x-AcDR3&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

 

[Sean]

who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions​

​

Maybe they are just following the example of the established mainstream journals (at least in some areas)?

 

[forestglip]

More press about this paper:

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Blog by one of the authors: "A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise"

Retraction Watch: "Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says"



Edit: Note from the blog:

The article will only be fully open-access in six months (damn you, publishing fees), but I’ve made the PDF available here (you can download the supplementary materials on the PNAS page).

 

[Sean]

Now vastly more complicated and voluminous due to AI, and only likely to quickly get even worse.

 

[Midnattsol]

who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions​

​

Maybe they are just following the example of the established mainstream journals (at least in some areas)?

Yes, we can't forget there is an underlying issue with the "traditional peer review standards" to begin with.