More and more scientific papers are being forged or bought. Well-organized networks are using artificial intelligence, among other things, to mass-produce “fake” studies, the largest number of which come from biomedicine – a field crucial to health and industry. Filip Slavković explores how forgeries threaten scientific literature. Maja Marić talks to professor Izet Mašić MD from Sarajevo about what has led to such a flood of scientific forgeries in the first place? And what about the plagiarism of politicians?
Falsified data and purchased publications are increasingly penetrating science. This is news that was exposed by researchers who claim that behind everything is a well-organized network of scientific fraud. Did artificial intelligence lead to this explosion? I am talking to prof. Dr. Izet Mašić on plagiarism checking systems, while colleague Filip Slavković investigates whether falsifications threaten scientific literature.
The research is clear: the number of fake scientific papers is growing almost ten times faster than the number of legitimate ones. Behind these figures are fraudulent networks that use automation and artificial intelligence to quickly and cheaply produce large quantities of falsified studies.
They are then sold at high prices. But why?
Scientists are under enormous pressure to publish new findings as quickly and frequently as possible, in addition to their daily work. This is supposedly a surefire way to get projects and then career advancement.
Here’s why: Some researchers pay tens of thousands of euros to be listed as co-authors.
A study by the University of Illinois (published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) shows that this kind of scientific fraud has already reached “industrial proportions.”
Retractions of published articles are becoming increasingly common – as many turn out to be forged, purchased, or otherwise questionable.
My colleague Filip Slavković is with me, who says that he was shocked by the way fraud in academic circles was organized and surprised by the extent of plagiarism in scientific papers. Filip, what is this about?
A new scientific paper has appeared, which deals with the scientific papers themselves and shows that frauds in the publication of scientific papers are so widespread and so systematically carried out that they have now reached industrial proportions. With the emergence of new technological possibilities for secretly copying other people’s works or creating false research results, a global illegal industry of plagiarism has developed. A new scientific paper has appeared, Maja, which deals with scientific works themselves and shows that frauds in the publication of scientific works are so widespread and so systematically carried out that they have now reached industrial proportions. With the emergence of new technological possibilities for secretly copying other people’s work or creating false research results, a global illegal industry of plagiarism has developed.
That sounds like organized crime among scientists. But what kind of study is that, and isn’t it also fake?
A five-member team of researchers wrote a study for the University of Illinois, in the United States of America, which they called “Entities that enable organized scientific fraud are numerous, stable and increasing”. And that name already says everything about what they established. The study was published at the beginning of August this year, i.e. just three weeks ago, in the specialized scientific journal PNAS, which is dedicated to works published in the American academic and scientific sphere. The attention it caused would certainly have attracted criticism if there had been a reason for it, so that it can really be said that the results of the study are credible, and it is no wonder that they caused great concern among experts.
And what specifically does that study say?
The research proves that there is more and more fraud in or among scientific works, and that in a big way. The researchers first established that there is an increasing number of professional works that have to be withdrawn because it turns out that they were plagiarized, that they were bought or that their publication was preceded by some other illegal activity. By the way, they established that the number of retracted scientific papers is increasing by comparing large collections of data on published studies. Scientific works are published in specialized journals, thus becoming part of the national or world scientific treasure and thereby bringing academic recognition to the authors, opening paths to a successful career and enabling higher earnings.
In order for a scientific paper to be accepted, it is not enough that the authors presented some data and claims, but it is necessary that a critical review be written by others, and the author should be recognized from the same field.
And finally, the editors in the aforementioned specialized journals decide on the publication of these works. This team of five researchers has now determined that in certain professional publications the same editors are responsible for a disproportionately high number of papers that were later found to be irregular in some way and were withdrawn. After further checks, they saw that a network of one and the same authors send papers to each other for checking, and that among these papers there are a disproportionate number of those that are later withdrawn, i.e. those that are found to be at least partially fake. And then they compared all that with the data on which specific types of fraud were used, and they saw that the same diagrams and graphics were often published in different works, all made on the basis of completely or at least partially fabricated data. In essence, they proved that there is a global network of fraudsters who fabricate parts of studies or complete scientific papers as if it were an organized criminal group that resells, for example, “Njaki” sneakers, “Abibaš” trainers, etc.
That was quite extensive; but it seems that the fraud with scientific papers has also become a large-scale operation?
The number of falsified studies is growing almost ten times faster than the total number of published scientific works. With the help of computer programs, and especially during the last couple of years with the help of artificial intelligence, completely fake publications can be written very quickly and cheaply and then sold for a lot of money. Plagiarism in itself is nothing new, only this latest study in the USA revealed the extent of the fraud. But there are scientists in Germany who have been dealing with the same problem for a long time, and one of them, Bernard Zabel from the University of Magdeburg, says that the first incentive often comes from a kind of plagiarism agencies that contact scientists themselves and offer to help them write papers, of course for money. The system is organized in detail so that the entire work on scientific work can be transferred to other specialized agencies, the so-called paper factories, which, as it is sometimes said, stamp hundreds or thousands of completely fictional studies on all possible subjects. And finally, the plagiarism agency finds editors of scientific journals who publish such fake papers. There, as in this entire illegal process, there are different rates, so for example the cheapest is to publish a study in a journal that few have heard of; it is more expensive to publish in one of the scientific journals that were once reputable but, for example, went bankrupt, so fraudsters bought only the name and use it; and the most expensive thing is to insert a fabricated study into one of those really renowned scientific journals in which the most important scientific works are published - but that is also possible.
And this is possible because those agencies that organize fraud then subsidize the publishers of scientific journals or?
In the end, fraud always works with the help of money and for the sake of money. On the one hand: specialized scientific journals publish scientific papers, that is their business model, and that is why they are interested in publishing the highest quality but also in publishing sufficient quantities. On the other hand: the academic system also requires scientific workers, but not only them, to publish papers at least occasionally. This also brings direct earnings, say from sales, but much more and career advancement, which then means either a higher monthly salary or additional well-paid jobs. Professor Bernhard Sabel from Magdeburg explains it like this using the German example: Universities and other scientific institutes themselves do not have all the money they need for all the research they want to carry out, so they are referred to funds or projects from which they draw additional budgets.
And in order to get those project funds, you always need to show something new and interesting that scientists have already done.
This increases the pressure on experts to always produce new studies, but there is often neither enough time nor enough people for that. How can, for example, a doctor of medicine who is also a surgeon, in addition to all his duties in the operating room, still manage to participate in the work of some new research every two years - this is the question that those agencies for plagiarism ask, so they contact doctors and offer their kind of help at a price of a few tens of thousands of euros, and the fraud begins. This, in fact, still happens very rarely, or at least it is rare in Germany and much more often in countries and societies that are not transparent, such as China or India or Iran. But every new plagiarism in science brings the danger that false results will be taken over in new works and that wrong conclusions will be drawn in the series, which would be especially dramatic in medicine. Professor Zabel just published the book “Fake Mafia” which shows that most of the plagiarism is from bio-medicine, although this is not surprising because most of the scientific papers here are from that field.
In Germany, however, plagiarism related to politics and politicians is much more well-known.
The oldest example is the politician Anette Schavan, whose doctoral dissertation from 1980 was withdrawn in 2013 because the so-called plagiarism hunters found that she used parts of other authors’ texts without marking them as taken over. Anet Šavan, otherwise a politician of the Hrićšan Democratic Union, was even the federal minister of education at that moment, so she had to resign. By the way, these plagiarism hunters appeared only twenty years ago, and their biggest “catch” so far was probably the Federal Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg from the Christian-Social Union, who was stripped of his doctorate title in 2011, which he obtained in 2007. Gutenberg also copied from other authors and did not mark other people’s research results as citations. Another high-ranking politician is now the former Prime Minister of Berlin, Franziska Giffey from the Social Democratic Party, whose doctoral thesis from 2010 was canceled in 2021. The problem with Gifaj was also copying other people’s texts. Plagiarized doctoral dissertations are different from fake scientific publications because doctoral dissertations are checked by university professors and these mentors are also responsible for the lack of control, while scientific papers published in specialized journals are practically not subject to any direct control by academic institutions. That is why Professor Zabel, for example, proposes to introduce control mechanisms for scientific publications, a kind of technical review, in order to prevent fraud.
Professor Izet Mašić, MD
There are expert systems that check plagiarism, but they are not as developed here in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But it is known exactly how many words or sentences you have the right to include in your article, so that those words are not declared plagiarism in that article. So there are standards for that too, it’s just that our students, postgraduates and undergraduates do not respect them, thinking that no one will check it.
Since artificial intelligence has emerged in the meantime, it is now easier to verify, but at the same time it is also easier to misuse, because the articles that authors take and use to fill in their content, that is, prove that what they obtained in their research and compared it with those who did it and published it in another journal, are difficult to verify, at least in our country. It is so difficult that even in the last twenty years or so, many have falsified the entire contents of books. Our judicial systems, and even university flying committees, can do nothing.
There are still many such cases today, however, there are expert systems that can check it. There is an association called “COPE Committee on Publication Ethics”. So when you report someone who you know has plagiarized, you actually get marked which words or sentences were taken, and you complain to the Committee of Publication Ethics, because you have no one else. But it is very difficult to prosecute such cases, even if they are proven.
The authors of the study from the University of Illinois, mentioned at the beginning, emphasize that science must strengthen control in order to protect its own credibility. German researcher Bernhard Sabel proposes the establishment of an independent supervisory body – a kind of “TÜV for science” – which would then monitor the situation. Adherence to the rules, systematic combing of journals and suppression of the “wild growth” of dubious publications.
There was not much discussion about less pressure on scientists to “stamp” a few dozen articles a year. At least not in the media.