Anna Abalkina

Maintaining research integrity is crucial for the credibility of science. A key threat to research integrity is the rise of paper mills, commercial entities that sell co-authorship slots and/or vio...

Fraudulent published papers were once thought to be rare, but in recent years, there has been growing awareness of coordinated activities by for‐profit organizations that charge authors a fee to sell articles and submit them to reputable journals. These are known as paper mills. We reflect here on how Mind, Brain and Education suffered from such an attack in 2022 and 2023, discussing what we have learnt from this experience about how paper mills might operate in biomedical and social sciences, how to identify red flags that an article might be fraudulent, and what steps might be taken to prevent such attacks in future.

Research paper mills are covert organizations that provide low-quality or fabricated manuscripts to paying clients. As members of the United2Act Research Working Group, we propose 5 key research questions on paper mills that require resourcing and support.

According to an estimate, there are at least 400,000 papers in the scientific literature originating from paper mills, which are for-profit companies that guarantee the publication of low-quality papers. There is evidence that such papers are accompanied by various forms of scientific misconduct, including plagiarism, image duplication, falsification, and fabrication of data. These papers are cited and included in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which have negative consequences for science and related disciplines. The scientific community has fragmented knowledge on paper mills, and many paper mills go undetected. Current resources of stakeholders are not sufficient to detect and prevent journals from publishing fraudulent papers. The goal of this presentation is to raise awareness of the paper mills problem and to discuss general ‘red flags’ of such papers, as well as possible measures to prevent editors and journals from publishing them. These measures may include open peer review, editor training, research on paper mills, improvement of detection methods, and united actions by stakeholders.

The study examines the prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals, a category of problematic journals that have proliferated over the past decade. A quasi-random sample of 936 papers published in 58 hijacked journals that provided free access to their archive as of June 2021 was selected for the analysis. The study utilizes Urkund (Ouriginal) software and manual verification to investigate plagiarism and finds a significant prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals. Out of the analyzed sample papers, 618 (66%) were found to contain instances of plagiarism, and 28% of papers from the sample (n = 259) displayed text similarities of 25% or more. The analysis reveals that a majority of authors originate from developing and ex-Soviet countries, with limited affiliation ties to developed countries and scarce international cooperation in papers submitted to hijacked journals. The absence of rigorous publication requirements, peer review processes, and plagiarism checks in hijacked journals creates an environment where authors can publish texts with a significant amount of plagiarism. These findings suggest a tendency for fraudulent journals to attract authors who do not uphold scientific integrity principles. The legitimization of papers from hijacked journals in bibliographic databases, along with their citation, poses significant challenges to scientific integrity.

We first describe the phenomenon of the academic paper mill, a kind of large-scale fraud in which authors pay to have work published in reputable journals. We give examples of some known paper mills and discuss ‘red flags’ that characterise their outputs. Most of the early examples were in biomedical and computational sciences and so paper mills are less familiar to many psychologists. In the next section, we describe a broker company/paper mill, Tanu.pro, discovered by the first author, which was identified by the use of fake email addresses. This paper mill placed six outputs in the Journal of Community Psychology, a reputable journal from a mainstream publisher. We look in detail at these papers and describe the features that confirm that malpractice was involved in publication. In five cases there was circumstantial evidence of tampering with the peer review process coupled with lack of editorial oversight. These papers have now been retracted. In a final section, we discuss the need for editors of psychology journals to be aware of potential targeting by paper mills and recommend editorial procedures to counteract these.