XPost: alt.politics.clinton, alt.politics.democrats, alt.news-media
XPost: misc.survivalism
From: bksherman@bleeding-rectums.cnn.com

When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research
papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of
the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their
charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the
executive editor at the journal. “I was determined to try to get
to the bottom of what was going on.”

A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from
the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry
(RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are
still under investigation. Fisher had found what seemed to be
the products of paper mills: companies that churn out fake
scientific manuscripts to order. All the papers came from
authors at Chinese hospitals. The journals’ publisher, the RSC
in London, announced in a statement that it had been the victim
of what it believed to be “the systemic production of falsified
research”.

What was surprising about this was not the paper-mill activity
itself: research-integrity sleuths have repeatedly warned that
some scientists buy papers from third-party firms to help their
careers. Rather, it was extraordinary that a publisher had
publicly announced something that journals generally keep quiet
about. “We believe that it is a paper mill, so we want to be
open and transparent,” Fisher says.

The RSC wasn’t alone, its statement added: “We are one of a
number of publishers to have been affected by such activity.”
Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers
that have been publicly linked to paper mills, an analysis by
Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected to
follow.

Much of this literature cleaning has come about because, last
year, outside sleuths publicly flagged papers that they think
came from paper mills owing to their suspiciously similar
features. Collectively, the lists of flagged papers total more
than 1,000 studies, the analysis shows. Editors are so concerned
by the issue that last September, the Committee on Publication
Ethics (COPE), a publisher-advisory body in London, held a forum
dedicated to discussing “systematic manipulation of the
publishing process via paper mills”. Their guest speaker was
Elisabeth Bik, a research-integrity analyst in California known
for her skill in spotting duplicated images in papers, and one
of the sleuths who posts their concerns about paper mills online.

Bik thinks there are thousands more of these papers in the
literature. The RSC’s announcement is significant for its
openness, she says. “It is pretty embarrassing that so many
papers are fake. Kudos to them to admit that they have been
fooled.”

At some journals that have had a spate of apparent paper-mill
submissions, editors have now revamped their review processes,
aiming not to be fooled again. Combating industrialized cheating
requires stricter review: telling editors to ask for raw data,
for instance, and hiring people specifically to check images.
Science publishing needs a “concerted, coordinated effort to
stamp out falsified research”, the RSC said.

Paper-mill detectives
In January 2020, Bik and other image detectives who work under
pseudonyms — Smut Clyde, Morty and Tiger BB8 — posted, on a blog
run by science journalist Leonid Schneider, a list of more than
400 published papers they said probably came from a paper mill.
Bik dubbed it the ‘tadpole’ paper mill, because of the shapes
that appeared in the papers’ western blot analyses, a type of
test used to detect proteins in biological samples. A spate of
media headlines followed. Throughout the year, the sleuths (not
always working together) posted spreadsheets of other suspect
papers — picking up on similar features across multiple studies.
By March 2021, they had collectively listed more than 1,300
articles, by Nature’s tally, as possibly coming from paper mills.

Journals started to look at the papers. According to Nature’s
analysis, around 26% of the articles that the sleuths alleged
came from paper mills have so far been retracted or labelled
with expressions of concern. Many others are still under
investigation. The Journal of Cellular Biochemistry (JCB), for
instance, announced in February1 that, last year, editors
investigated and retracted 23 of 137 papers alleged to contain
image manipulation.

Journals did not identify problems with all of the papers that
had been flagged. Chris Graf, director of research integrity at
Wiley, which publishes JCB, said in January that the publisher
had completed investigations into 73 papers identified by Bik
and others, and had found no reason to act on 11 of them. Seven
others required corrections and 55 have been retracted or will
be retracted.

Publishers almost never explicitly declare on retraction notices
that a particular study is fraudulent or was created by a
company to order, because it is difficult to prove. None of the
RSC’s retraction notices, for instance, mentions a paper mill —
despite the RSC’s announcement that it thinks the articles did
come from one. But Nature has tallied 370 articles retracted
since January 2020, all from authors at Chinese hospitals, that
either publishers or independent sleuths have alleged to come
from paper mills (see ‘Fraud allegations’). Most were published
in the past three years (see ‘Chinese hospital papers on the
rise’). Publishers have added expressions of concern to another
45 such articles.

FRAUD ALLEGATIONS: barchart showing the number of published
papers potentially linked to companies that produce fraudulent
work.
Sources: forbetterscience.com, scienceintegritydigest.com and
Nature analysis

Nature has identified a further 197 retractions of papers from
authors at Chinese hospitals since the start of last year. These
are not ones that have made it onto lists of potential
publication-mill products, although some were flagged by sleuths
for image concerns, often on the post-publication peer-review
website PubPeer.

Industrialized cheating
The problem of organized fraud in publishing is not new, and not
confined to China, notes Catriona Fennell, who heads publishing
services at the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier.
“We’ve seen evidence of industrialized cheating from several
other countries, including Iran and Russia,” she told Nature
last year. Others have also reported on Iranian and Russian
paper-mill activities.

In a statement this year to Nature, Elsevier said that its
journal editors detect and prevent the publication of thousands
of probable paper-mill submissions each year, although some do
get through.

China has long been known to have a problem with firms selling
papers to researchers, says Xiaotian Chen, a librarian at
Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. As far back as 2010, a
team led by Shen Yang, a management-studies researcher then at
Wuhan University in China, warned of websites offering to
ghostwrite papers on fictional research, or to bypass peer-
review systems for payment. In 2013, Science reported on a
market for authorships on research papers in China. In 2017,
China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) said it would
crack down on misconduct after a scandal in which 107 papers
were retracted at the journal Tumor Biology; their peer reviews
had been fabricated and a MOST investigation concluded that some
had been produced by third-party companies.

Physicians in China are a particular target market because they
typically need to publish research articles to gain promotions,
but are so busy at hospitals that they might not have time to do
the science, says Chen. Last August, the Beijing municipal
health authority published a policy stipulating that an
attending physician wanting to be promoted to deputy chief
physician must have at least two first-author papers published
in professional journals; three first-author papers are required
to become a chief physician. These titles affect a physician’s
salary and authority, as well as the surgeries they are allowed
to perform, says Changqing Li, a former senior physician and
gastroenterology researcher at a Chinese hospital who now lives
in the United States.

“The effect is devastating,” says Li, about the impacts on
Chinese science. “The literature environment published in
Chinese is already ruined, since hardly anyone believes them or
references studies from them.”

“Now this plague has eroded into the international medical
journals,” he adds. The fact that people use paper mills also
affects China’s reputation globally, says Futao Huang, a Chinese
researcher working at Hiroshima University in Japan.

The prevalence of problem papers is leading some journal editors
to doubt the submissions they get from Chinese hospital
researchers. “The increasing volume of this ‘junk science’ is
wreaking havoc on the credibility of the research emanating out
of China and increasingly casting doubt upon legitimate science
from the region,” said a February 2021 editorial2 in the journal
Molecular Therapy.

Several other editors echo these concerns about the impact of
paper mills. “They are undermining our confidence in the other
manuscripts received from Chinese groups,” says Frank Redegeld,
editor in chief of the European Journal of Pharmacology,
published by Elsevier.

CHINESE HOSPITAL PAPERS ON THE RISE: chart showing the rise in
English language articles with authors from Chinese hospitals.
Source: lens.org

China’s science and education ministries have taken steps to
curb problematic publication incentives. They published a notice
last February telling research institutions — including
hospitals — not to promote or recruit researchers solely on the
basis of the numbers of papers they publish, and also told them
to stop paying cash bonuses for papers. And in August, China
announced the introduction of measures to crack down on research
misconduct, including attempts to curb independent contractors
who fabricate data on others’ behalf. (MOST didn’t respond to
Nature’s request for comment on the scale of the problem or the
impact of its measures.)

Some Chinese researchers think these measures are beginning to
work. Li Tang, who researches science policy at Fudan University
in Shanghai, China, is hopeful that submissions from paper mills
in China will fall in the future — although she notes that the
issue isn’t confined to Chinese research.

Redegeld says he hasn’t yet seen a decrease in the number of
suspected paper-mill manuscripts his journal receives, which he
estimates to be around 15 a month.

Problem signs
Image-integrity sleuths and journal editors have identified a
range of features in manuscripts that could be fingerprints of a
paper mill. “We’re wondering how we protect ourselves from
publishing this stuff,” says Jana Christopher, an image-
integrity analyst at the publisher FEBS Press in Heidelberg,
Germany, who screens incoming manuscripts for a number of
journals, and helped the RSC with its investigation.

Potential signs of trouble include papers from different authors
at different institutions sharing similar features: western
blots with identical-looking backgrounds and suspiciously smooth
outlines, titles that seem to be variations on a theme, bar
charts with identical layouts that supposedly represent
different experiments, or identical plots of flow cytometry
analyses, which are used in studying cells. It seems that these
manuscripts are produced from common templates, with words and
images slightly tweaked to make the papers look a little
different.

A particular problem is biomedical articles that claim to
investigate understudied genetic regions that might be involved
in cancers. Jennifer Byrne, a molecular oncology researcher at
the University of Sydney, Australia, specializes in exposing
flawed papers of this type, by spotting that their experimental
details sometimes list incorrect nucleotide sequences or
reagents, so that the experiments described cannot have taken
place. Many of these papers are probably doctored simply by
switching around the type of cancer or the genes involved in the
study, says Byrne, although it’s hard to prove they’re from
paper mills. “This problem of incorrect nucleotide sequences in
the literature is rampant,” she says.

At last September’s COPE forum, Bik rattled off other red flags
for editors to watch out for, including papers from Chinese

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)