Paper mills: the ‘cartel-like’ companies behind fraudulent scientific journals

Oct 23, 2024

Lecturer in Social Psychology, Universitas Airlangga

Rizqy Amelia Zein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Science and Nature, two leading science journals, have revealed a growing problem: an alarming rise in fraudulent research papers produced by shady paper mill companies. This wave of fake studies is creating a major headache for the academic world, putting the integrity of global academic research at risk.

Paper mill companies offer authorship services to researchers, academics, and students who want their names listed as an author of a scientific article published in reputable scientific journals.

By paying around €180 to €5000 (approximately US$197 - $5472), a person can have their name listed as the author of research paper, without having to painstakingly do research and write the results. No doubt, some experts refer to these paper mills as illegal and criminal organizations.

A 2023 research highlights a dramatic increase in fraudulent scientific artiles traced back to paper mills. In just five years, the numbers of retractions soared jumped from 10 in 2019 to 2,099 in 2023.

Paper mills have also extremely overwhelmed major scientific journal publishers. Hindawi and Wiley, publishers of open access journals in the UK, for example, retracted around 1,200 paper mill articles in 2023. SAGE, a global publisher of books, journals and academic library resources and Elsevier, a scholarly publisher in the Netherlands also retracted hundreds of paper mill articles in 2022.

Paper mills are found operating in countries whose research policies incentivise researchers to produce as many scientific articles as possible, such as China, Russia, India and Iran.

However, their customer profile is quite diverse, from both developed and developing countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Germany, and the United States (US).

Based on research data and investigative journalist reports from the last five years, I summarise how these paper mills operate and how to detect them.

1. Problematic articles

Paper mills generally manipulate the process of publishing scientific articles. These articles usually plagiarise other published articles, contain false and stolen data, or include engineered and duplicated images.

They also offer to rewrite scientific articles using generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT and Quillbot, or to translate published articles from other languages into English.

2. A promised path to publication

In some cases, paper mills offer authorship slots before an article is accepted for publication.

In other cases, they offer authorship slots after the article is ready to be published by the journal.

Therefore, it is not uncommon for paper mills to sell authorship slots with a guarantee that the article will definitely be published. In fact, according to the conventions generally accepted in the academic community, no well-run journal can give such a guarantee.

Publishing decisions are normally made only after editors have considered the feedback from peer reviewers. This means, there is no possibility for a manuscript to secure acceptance before passing the peer review process.

3. Fake reviews and corrupt deals

Paper mills also offer a wide range of additional services. For example, they offer fake peer review services to convince potential buyers that the offered articles have passed rigorous review.

To smooth the way for their operations, some paper mills even operate like a cartel, bribing rogue journal editors to ensure publication. A 2024 investigation by a Science journalist revealed that some scientific journal editors were offered as much as $20,000 to cooperate with these schemes. This investigation resulted in more than 30 editors of reputable international journals identified as involved in paper mill activities.

4. Unusual collaboration patterns

One of the peculiarities of paper mill articles is its strange mix of authors. An article on the activity of ground beetles attacking crops in Kazakhstan, for example, is written by authors who are neither affiliated with institutions in Kazakhstan nor experts in insects or agriculture. The authors’ backgrounds are suspiciously heterogeneous, ranging from anaesthesia, dentistry, to biomedical engineering.

5. Anonymous co-authors

Prospective customers of paper mill services usually have to agree to the rules of confidentiality. By agreeing to this rule, buyers have no idea which journal their article will target or who their co-authors will be. Often, the authors listed on the same paper don’t even know each other.

Detecting scientific articles produced by paper mills often begins with analyzing retraction patterns carried out by journals.

This can be done in two ways: by tracking post-publication peer reviews on platforms like PubPeer, or by checking the Retraction Watch database, a website that documents retractions of problematic scientific articles.

However, journals rarely state outright that a retraction is due to paper mill fraud. Instead, articles are typically pulled for reasons like improper inclusion of the name and order of authors, inclusion of many irrelevant citations or references, plagiarism, or inclusion of manipulated or duplicated images.

The proportion of scientific articles retracted for being associated with paper mills is much smaller than the estimated total number of paper mill articles currently in circulation.

Retraction Watch data, as of May 2024, only recorded 7,275 retractions of articles related to the paper mill out of a total of 44,000 retractions recorded. In fact, it is estimated that up to 400,000 paper mill articles have infiltrated scientific literature over the past two decades.

Despite significant efforts from publishers and the academic community through organizations such as United2Act, a global alliance initiated by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and STM, these attempts are barely enough.

The UK Research Integrity Office—an independent UK charity that offers support to the public, researchers and organisations to promote good academic research practice—estimates that the paper mill industry has gained around $10 million globally.

For example, a Russian paper mill could earn $6.5 million if they sold all the authorship of scientific articles it produced from 2019 to 2021.

In Indonesia, this financial loss directly impacts the public. Public universities rely on the state budget, funded largely by taxpayers, and tuition fees from students to cover operational expenses, including research grants and publication incentives.

Though the exact financial toll of these paper mills is hard to pin down, it is clear that the public are footing the bill for fraudulent research practices, siphoning resources away from enuin academic advancements.

This article was originally published in Indonesian