Increasing pressure to publish is causing some people to deviate from the correct path of scientific research and take the easy route by publishing fake articles. As Richardson et al. report in PNAS, there are increasing reports of coordinated scientific fraud. This could have serious implications for meta-science as well as education and training if it is not possible to filter out all dishonestly produced articles from scientific databases. Taking such information without scientific value into account means that it is included in the evaluations of meta-analyses and deep learning systems, thereby reducing the overall scientific value.

The authors report on strategies that institutions promoting scientific fraud can use to circumvent interventions.

There are a few approaches, such as the Problematic Paper Screener, a tool developed by three computer scientists from France and Canada to identify such fake publications.

Original publication:
Richardson, R.A.K. , Hong, S.S., Byrne, J.A., Stoeger, T. & Amaral, L.A.N. (2025). The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (32) e2420092122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122 (2025).

Problematic Paper Screener:
https://dbrech.irit.fr/

Click here for the article (n German):
https://www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de/die-muehlen-der-fake-wissenschaft-158260/