According to a recent report in the New York Times, a study by data scientist Lu ís A. Nunes Amaral of Northwestern University in the United States showed that, the problem of academic fraud in the country has grown exponentially. The number of fake journal papers produced by the“Paper Factory” doubles every year and a half, far faster than the overall number of academic papers doubles every 15 years. In addition, the team extrapolated from statistical models that the actual output of a“Paper factory” could be 100 times the number of cases exposed.
The research team built a database of more than a million academic papers. Combined with online forum and“Retraction Observation Database”, 30,000 papers with obvious correlation were sorted out. These papers show a significant cluster characteristics, the performance of the same cluster of papers tend to be published in a similar period of time, and concentrated in the same publisher’s journals. Further tracing of the links between these papers reveals numerous high-frequency collaborations between editors and authors. Members of the research team point out that this kind of organized, connected interaction is typical of collusion, and is clear evidence of collusion in academic fraud.
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Since 2010, American journal editors and academic watchdog organizations have warned that the trust system on which scientific research depends is facing serious challenges. They make clear that there is a growing number of papers on academic misconduct such as data falsification and image tampering.
In recent years, the real factors driving the spread of disorder continue to ferment. With the growth of graduate students, the contradiction between the limited academic resources and the increasing supply of talents becomes more and more obvious, high-quality papers have become a core measure of academic success-not only a“Stepping stone” to employment, but also a“Hard core chip” for promotion and funding. The over-reliance on the results of the paper provides fertile ground for counterfeiting. In the face of the strong demand for academic publications, publishers add thousands of journals each year. “The business interests of publishers and the business logic of publishing are driven by the ‘quantity first’ model,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, Executive Director of the Center for Scientific Integrity.
Moreover, cuts in US government funding for scientific research could be a potential driver of academic fraud. The National Cancer Institute announced last month that it would fund only The top 4 per cent of science grant applications for The rest of The fiscal year, up from 7 per cent previously. At the same time, larger cuts in research funding are under consideration. In the reality of shrinking research resources and scarce research posts, researchers have to spend a lot of energy on the competition of limited resources and the maintenance of living space, it is easy to induce more fraud, and eventually cause the systematic erosion of scientific research integrity system.
Through data tracking, the research team found that many pseudo-academic institutions are mass-producing fake or low-quality research on an industrial scale, these“Thesis factories” have turned academic fraud into a set of mature profiteering industrial chain. In response, Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the University of Free University of Berlin, points out that scientists eager to “Gold-plate” their resumes need only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, you can buy the right to sign a paper that has nothing to do with you, making academia a tradable commodity.
Abarkina added that to avoid the weight-checking system, “Essay factories” often use artificial intelligence tools to technically rewrite plagiarized text, but this kind of“AI fakes” actually often because of the blunt rewrite self-defeating, causes the thesis finished product to be ridiculed generously. However, the application of AI technology still means that the technical threshold of academic fraud has been greatly reduced, but the hidden is significantly improved. “The underlying risks are not negligible, and the escalation of this technology-enabled fraud is a real concern,” she said.
Faced with the spread of academic fraud, many experts put forward targeted governance recommendations. Elisabeth Bik, a longtime expert on academic fraud, suggested that academic publishers work with credit card companies to set up mechanisms to monitor suspicious transactions, at the same time put more profits into the monitoring of paper fraud.
Amaral said it would be difficult to stop the spread of academic fraud by relying on conventional means such as retractions. “It’s like bailing water out of a small cup while the faucet keeps pumping,” he said figuratively. “It’s not going to turn things around, and it’s not going to solve the problem at the source.” A mechanism should be put in place to penalize the suspension of publication and to include in the list of regulations those well-known scholars who have signed low-quality papers that have not been verified. This will strengthen the author’s sense of full responsibility for his or her own signature research, and may reduce the number of papers published, but only then will the quality of academic writing really return first.
Dr Oranskiy stresses that incentives for researchers must also be adjusted. “The crux of the problem is incentives,” he said. “We have to reshape the value orientation of the academic world by optimizing institutions to make loopholes unprofitable.”