2024-01-05 14:23:49
Paper mills are also the names given to the organizations that falsify research articles for money. Image: dpa
More than 10,000 research articles were retracted last year because the results were fabricated or falsified.
Last year, more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted by mid-December, more than ever before. The proportion of withdrawn publications has doubled since 2020 and is now around 0.2 percent. In the minority of the articles affected, the authors themselves took the initiative, for example because they noticed errors. The vast majority of withdrawn publications are fakes.
Research falsification factories
More than 8,000 of the affected articles appeared in journals published by the London publisher Hindawi, a subsidiary of Wiley, one of the largest scientific publishers in the world. According to Guido Herrmann, managing director at Wiley in Weinheim, the evidence that Wiley collected during internal investigations “points to fraudulent activities by Paper Mills”. Paper mills are for-profit organizations that produce and sell manuscripts designed to look like real research. To do this, they manipulate the identities of guest editors, authors and reviewers and invent or falsify research results. In doing so, they repeatedly succeed in deceiving the publishers’ quality assurance and bypassing the peer review system for scientific publications.
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