Research warns that fake science black markets are faster than legal research
A new study Northwestern University researchers have raised alerts about the future of academic research, warning that fraud science is published faster than legal research.
Over the past four centuries, a hidden contract has been established between scientists and states: in exchange for knowledge useful for economic and social development, the government and other benefactors provide researchers with stable careers, good salaries and public recognition. This model is similar to commercial enterprises, has proven to be effective and has been replicated in most parts of the world.
However, recent studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal conference show that in recent years, the system (researchers, academic institutions, government agencies, private companies and communication platforms) have shown signs of decomposition.
The authors argue that due to the massive and specialization of contemporary science, each participant’s contribution is no longer assessed by the inherent merits of their work, but rather through quantitative indicators such as the number of other research papers, other research, university rankings, or the frequency of awards and other accredited articles.
“These indicators have quickly become targets for measuring institutional and individual impact, which creates unlimited competition and is inequality in the distribution of resources, incentives and rewards,” the author warns.
This, in turn, has led to the spread of fraud in certain parts of the scientific community as researchers are looking for ways to quickly obtain indicators of success. “Using numerical indicators to evaluate projects and professionals … encouraging the search for shortcuts,” said Pere Puigdomènech, chairman of the Spanish Council on Research Integrity (CIR-CAT). The types of fraud detected range from the creation of virtual research to the plagiarism, to the purchase and sale of authorship and citations in papers.
The mafia threatening the integrity of science
Northwest research shows that fraud cases are often not isolated events, but the result of complex networks that operate systematically to undermine scientific integrity.
The research team behind this article, led by Luis, a professor of engineering science and applied mathematics at the Northwest McCormick School of Engineering, came to this conclusion after analyzing a large number of data on withdrawn publications, editorial records and image duplications.
Sources include major aggregators of scientific literature such as Science, Scopus, PubMed/Medline and Openalex, as well as lists of journals removed from these databases to violate quality or ethical standards. In addition, reviews from the survey website withdrawal watches, comments from the Science Paper Review website Pubpeer, and comments from the edited metadata (editing name, submission and acceptance date) were collected and analyzed.
This analysis highlights the work of “pulp”, which is the mass production of low-quality manuscripts and sometimes selling them through intermediaries to sell to scholars who wish to publish materials quickly. These papers usually contain fake data, manipulated or copyrighted images, stolen content, and even absurd or physically impossible claims. “These networks are essentially criminal organizations, jointly forging scientific processes,” Amaral said in a statement released by Northwestern University.
