The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly

Source: Richardson et al., PNAS · 2025-08-04

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.

Introduction. 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.

Over the last four centuries, the production of scientific knowledge has increasingly become a matter of state and societal importance. The “contract” between scientists and states can be summarized thusly: In exchange for creating new knowledge that is useful to the state and training a workforce able to use that knowledge, society supports scientists with rewarding careers, good salaries, and public recognition. The success of this contract has led to an extraordinary growth in the scale and scope of the scientific enterprise (1) and to its adoption across the world (2). Indeed, some studies suggest that the wealth of a nation is closely aligned with the amount (3, 4) and quality (5) of the research it produces.

The state-supported scientific enterprise can be idealized as a public goods game (6) with numerous and diverse stakeholders. Because of the increasing complexity of the knowledge being created and increased specialization, the system relies on the goodfaith assumption of genuine contributions by all participants (7–10). Scientists rely on other scientists to disclose knowledge that can be built upon, on other scientists and on publishers for the screening of scientific studies, on publishers for the dissemination of their work and on funding agencies and universities for support. Universities and funding agencies rely on scientists for evaluating the work of their peers and on the state and society for their funding. Private-sector firms rely on universities to educate a knowledgeable workforce. The state and society rely on scientists to produce knowledge that will improve well-being and state security. Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff formalized certain aspects of this web of relationships in their ‘triple helix’ model of knowledge-based economic development (11).

The success of this model could be in jeopardy if some stakeholders fail to contribute fairly to the tasks assigned to them. Due to the increasing scale and scope of the scientific enterprise, the degree to which stakeholders contribute to the system is now increasingly evaluated by potentially misleading proxies (12, 13) such as the h-index (14), journal impact factor, university rankings, and scientific prizes. Nonetheless, these proxies have quickly become targets for evaluation of institutional and personal impact, resulting in increasing competition and growing inequality in how resources and rewards are distributed (15–20), which could leave the scientific enterprise more susceptible to defection (16, 21–23).

Scholarly defection occurs when there is a failure to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce while still benefiting from the contract. A 2002 survey of scientists funded by the United States NIH reported that 0.2% of mid-career researchers and 0.5% of early-career researchers admitted to falsifying research data in the previous three years (16). A systematic analysis of more than 20,000 articles published between 1995 and 2014 reported that 3.8% of these articles contained inappropriately duplicated images, with at least half of these cases suggestive of deliberate manipulation (24). We and others have also recently described a class of entities engaging in large scale scientific fraud, typically denoted “paper mills,” that sell mass-produced low quality and fabricated research articles (as described by Byrne et al.

Related work. Studies of repeating public goods games teach us that, under some conditions, player contributions tend to decay over time and that contributions decrease substantially as the number of defectors increases (34). To discourage defection and sustain a collaborative system, public goods games must enforce mechanisms that disincentivize defection (35–37). To this end, the scientific enterprise has implemented several formal punishment mechanisms for defectors. Funding agencies can sanction individual researchers and universities with fines and exclusion from funding programs. Universities can sanction researchers with rescission of contracts. Journals can sanction authors with retraction of publications. Literature aggregators can sanction journals by removing them from their indices (deindexing) (38– 40). These formal measures complement additional informal measures such as exclusion of defectors from scientists’ personal trust networks, shaming (41), and documentation of concerns on postpublication review sites (42, 43). However, the evidence suggests that these mechanisms have not yet been successful in stemming the tide of defections (24–33).

Method. To uncover connections between these individuals, we built a network of the publishing relationships among them (within PLOS ONE alone, Fig. 1E). Even though we lack information on relationships that involve other journals, we are still able to find densely connected group of individuals serving as editors between 2020 and 2023 (Bottom Right cluster in Fig. 1E). These editors, affiliated with institutions from four different countries, sent most of their submissions to one another over other editors. More than half of the articles accepted by this group of editors have been retracted with nearly identical notices—“one of a series of submissions for which we have concerns about authorship, competing interests, and peer review” (70).

Similar to how editors handle journal submissions, the articles published through conference proceedings are usually handled by a small team of conference organizers who could also accept an excessive number of problematic articles. We apply the same methodology to all IEEE conference proceedings since 2003 (SI Appendix, Fig. S14), treating each conference proceeding as Coordinated Production of Fraudulent Science. Anomalous patterns are not only present in the editorial handling of peer-review. Indeed, it is thought that “paper mills” are capable of producing fraudulent research at scale (29, 61, 71, 72). Thus, we investigated whether there is coordination in the production of fraudulent science and in the co-opting of scientific journals by paper mills and whether such coordination leaves a trace in the scientific literature.

To pursue this investigation, we made use of a hallmark of fraudulent science: image duplication. We built a network comprising 2,213 articles flagged for duplicate images (nodes), which are connected through 4,188 observations of image duplication between articles (edges). This network is split among 20 connected components (Fig. 2A). Because some of those components are quite large (maximum size is 622 articles), we used a stochastic block modeling approach for identifying modules within each connected component (73, 74) (Fig. 2B). Despite the fact that image duplication implies that these studies did not occur as described, only 34.1% have been retracted (Fig. 2C).

According to our working hypothesis of paper mill operations, paper mills produce and publish articles in large batches. By this model, papers within each batch could use a fixed bank of images (rather than piecemeal appropriation and assembly of images from multiple sources) and the resultant articles would manifest as modules within our image sharing network. Our hypothesis also implies that articles within each module would tend to appear in the same journals around the same time. Thus, one would expect that articles within a module would be heavily concentrated within specific publishers and within specific years, and we should be able to reject the null hypothesis that the distributions of publishers and years of publication obtained for different modules are statistically indistinguishable.

Discussion. Our working hypothesis and these anomalous patterns are consistent with a modus operandi where paper mills cooperate with brokers—or act, themselves, as brokers—who control at least some of the decisions at target journals and can guarantee Evidence of Journal Targeting and “Journal Hopping”. An implication of the working hypothesis just discussed is that paper mills have the ability to guarantee publication across sets of journals and publishers. However, over time, certain journals may fall out of favor with a paper mill’s clientele or may otherwise become unavailable. For instance, a journal used by a paper mill may be deindexed by WoS or Scopus, leading to decreased demand for publications in this journal by clientele belonging to academic organizations that only credit articles in indexed journals. Thus, one would expect that the set of journals with which a paper mill operates would tend to change over time. We call this adaptive behavior “journal hopping.”

We were able to uncover an entity that displays this behavior: ARDA advertises “Conferences and Meetings,” “Journal Publication” and “Thesis/Article Writing” on its website. As of June 2024, ARDA’s homepage reported involvement in “4,565+ Many articles published in the journals listed by ARDA are well outside the journal’s stated scope (e.g. an article about roasting hazelnuts in a journal about HIV/AIDS care or an article about malware detection in a journal about special education). For the set of five journals that we inspected comprehensively, we found that between 34.0% and 98.7% of the articles published in these journals were outside of the journal’s stated scope (Datasets S7 and S8).

Among these journals, we also found many publications with authors from multiple countries (10.1%), supporting the hypothesis that paper mills will sell authorship slots on individual manuscripts but contrasting with the hypothesis that paper mill Differential Prevalence of Fraud Within Disciplinary Subfields. Our results show that networks of individuals and entities act to produce fraudulent manuscripts, to select journals and publishers for targeting, and to facilitate their publication in journals indexed by aggregators such as WoS and Scopus.

Next, we investigated whether certain subfields are preferentially selected by those involved in scientific fraud. We restricted our analysis to closely related and similarly sized subfields in the biology of RNA that have each seen recent increases in popularity. We further restrict our attention to six subfields of interest to RNA biologists, namely CRISPR-Cas9, transfer RNAS (tRNAs) and development, tRNAs and cancer, circular RNAs, micro-RNAs (miRNAs) and development, miRNAs and cancer, and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), and download bibliometric information on articles returned when searching in PubMed (exact search strings shown as titles in Fig. 4). Among these closely related subfields, paper mills are suspected to be particularly drawn to miRNAs, circular RNAs, and lncRNAs (76–78).

Scientific Fraud Is Growing Much Faster than the Scientific Enterprise As a Whole. Several studies have recently attempted to characterize the scale of published paper mill products in relation to the scale of the overall scientific literature (30, 79). Acceptance of those estimates has been hindered by limitations in the field’s ability to unambiguously recognize articles produced by paper mills, by the heterogeneous rates of fraud by discipline (Fig. 4) and by the difficulty in conceiving that the enterprise of scientific fraud is sufficiently large or coordinated.

Conclusion. At the very least, significantly more research is needed toward both characterizing the diverse entities governing systematic scientific fraud as well as developing a unified and comprehensive vocabulary for describing them (93, 94).

Finally, it is important to explicitly highlight the risk posed by large scale fraudulent science to emerging cutting-edge approaches. Both “machine scientists” (96, 97) and large language models hold the promise to help encapsulate the knowledge in the scientific literature for the use of scientists and the lay public. However, such approaches are not yet able to distinguish quality science from poor quality or fraudulent science and this task only becomes more difficult as the number of fraudulent scientific publications increases.

Limitations. A limitation of our study is the comprehensiveness of the data we consider. Our analyses rely on the instances of scientific fraud that have been reported. It is likely that many fields and journals are underrepresented in the corpora we consider. Indeed, the consensus among experts is that the vast majority of paper mill products have not been detected (30, 79, 82). Further, some of our case studies focus on particular disciplines, outside of which our findings may not be generalizable.

Additionally, temporal changes in detection effort or in the attention paid to different fields may produce spurious trends. Indeed, the many unknowns about the global enterprise of scientific fraud leave open the possibility that the scale of systematic fraudulent activity has always been large but that only now has been detected. We comment further on this possibility in SI Appendix.