In the past few years there have been increasing instances of the systematic manipulation of the publishing process. Fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research articles have made their way through the peer review process and have been published in reputable journals. “Paper Mills”, organizations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts are at the center of this problem. This Nature news article describes how more than 10,000 research articles have been retracted in 2023 due to integrity issues and the systematic manipulation of the publishing process.
The impact of fraudulent research being published with the stamp of authority of a peer-reviewed journal is far-reaching. Not only is it damaging to the trust researchers place in the publication system, but the fraudulent research may be used to build more research, wasting money and time for a researcher. Scholarly journals have become increasingly aware of paper mill articles and are working to develop methods to screen for them. For researchers, it is extremely difficult to detect these published articles. While this issue is not directly the result of AI. AI is exacerbating the problem making it easier to fabricate research, and the methods described in this guide for detecting AI may be useful in detecting fabricated research. Additionally researchers should become familiar with how retractions are communicated in their discipline and journals. This can help to avoid citing fraudulent research, but of course this only applies to research that has been identified as fraudulent. The Retraction Watch database is a tool that can be used to identify retracted journal articles.