A 2022 of fake scientific articles: a fraud on an industrial scale

2022 was a year during which, on a previously unseen scale, it was tested the fraudulent manipulation of scientific publications on a large scale. The basic elements are well known to all: the evaluation of the scientific production of individuals and institutions based on numerical indices which grow as the number of publications increases has created a “race for publication” which makes use of every means to obtain a number of articles published sufficient to access funding and career advancement.

This mechanism, furthermore promoted in Italy with a recklessness that borders on delinquency, can only favor the multiplication of bogus scientific publications, for a simple Darwinian competition; and where there is abundant demand, sooner or later supply arrives, so that in addition to a multitude of individual cheaters, we then arrive at systemic deviation: on the one hand, the production by special companies of fake scientific articles put up for sale to the highest bidder, then sent to magazines and often published, and on the other the flourishing of organized academic bands who, through the control of editorial boards, systematically favor their respective research groups, corrupting the anonymous review procedure.

Individuals involved may also be Nobel laureates: In 2019, Gregg Semenza shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his 1990s breakthroughs in the sensing of oxygen by our body’s cells.

This year, he had to retract four articles he published in series on PNAS due to the presence of manipulated images.

However, the real difference observed in 2022 concerns as we said at the beginning industrial-scale fraudmore than those of individuals. Iop, a science publisher that publishes journals in the field of physical sciences, retracted 850 articles in 2022after Nick Wise, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK who studies fluid dynamics, noticed that many of them contained nonsense sentences – produced by artificial intelligence programs that try to avoid plagiarism checker software – repeated a staggering number of times in different articles from different groups.

When Iop began to investigate, the publisher found other similarities that suggested the articles came from a so-called “scientific paper mill”one of those companies that place paid pseudo-articles.

In addition to this and many other examples of “scientific paper mills” discovered in 2022, this was also the year in which cases of large-scale organized manipulation of the scientific review process were confirmed. In October, Elsevier’s Thinking Skills and Creativity magazine pulled nearly 50 articles because of it. This September, publisher Hindawi, a Wiley subsidiary, announced it would pull more than 500 articles in 16 journals after a months-long investigation found that networks of reviewers and editors manipulated the review process.

Now, what is happening has been perfectly foreseen and announced for at least a decade, even by myself in a dedicated popular book.

And yet, the combined interest of those who, whether by ideology or by foolish conviction, continue to promote ever more extreme forms of bibliometric evaluation in our country, together with that of those who have understood well how to make the most of the manipulation of publication indexes, together finally with the scientific publishing industry, I say all these interests together conspire to undermine the credibility of scientific communication, promoting a drugged and toxic system of competition for the maximum number of publications.

The solution to this problem cannot be achieved without abandoning the stupid pursuit of bibliometric indexes in favor of more balanced systems, as has already happened in other countries for public scientific institutions; there is nothing to invent, just to understand that continuing to persist in this stupid game will bring our research community and with it our country further and further back.