Advancing our Understanding of Systematic Manipulation & Paper Mills: Wiley & CWTS Partnership

Although fraud and misconduct have always existed in research and scholarly communication, the rise of paper mills over the past decade has led to an unprecedented volume of fake or manipulated research being published. A 2022 report jointly published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the STM Association suggests that between 2 and 46% of submissions to journals in the time between 2019 and 2021 were produced by paper mills. In 2023 alone, more than 14,000 papers were retracted, with the majority attributed to paper mill activity. 

Research fraud has justifiably become a focus of attention for publishers, institutions, researchers, and funders alike. New tools are being developed to detect paper mill activity and new collaborations are being forged among diverse stakeholders, such as United2Act, to try and address the challenges more generally. Funders and policy makers are also increasingly taking action. The European Commission recently funded a large-scale project to develop standard operating procedures across EU funding bodies and research institutions to combat falsification, fabrication and plagiarism in scientific publishing. In China, the Ministry of Education has recently conducted a nation-wide audit of retractions and misconduct.

However, there has been little formalized research undertaken to understand the marketplace that allows paper mills to thrive. This gap has led to a recent call for action by Jennifer Byrne and other members of the United2Act Working Group 3 to carry out research projects on paper mill operations and their impact on research and scholarship.

PhD position

Publishers, funders and research institutions each have roles to play in the ethical dissemination of research. In support of this responsibility, Wiley is sponsoring a 4-year position for a PhD candidate that will be focused on understanding the scale and operation of paper mills, and the research incentive cultures that provide the marketplace for them to thrive. The candidate will be located at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, under the supervision of research teams there and at the University of Sheffield. This collaboration will build on an extensive body of meta-research projects these teams have carried out in the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).

Partnership

In partnership, CWTS and Wiley will combine their expertise in seeking to better understand these issues. That includes a focus on understanding new and existing patterns of systematic manipulation, the efficacy of integrity screening and investigations, and the value of transparency in the research and publishing process. The PhD candidate will undertake their research independently with independent supervision. The research outputs will be owned exclusively by the research teams, published in an open access format, and to the extent possible will incorporate open research practices.

Wiley in particular has experience with both combatting paper mill content and with coordinating research integrity strategies across multiple stakeholders. We recognize the tensions that will need to be addressed openly and collaboratively throughout the project, including how we balance the various responsibilities of publishers, editors, institutions and the wider academic community to uphold research integrity.

Expected outcomes

We aspire to gain a deeper understanding of the scale and operation of paper mills, as well as the complex interplay between the superstructure of incentives and varying research norms in scholarship that enable them. What leads such norms to clash and how do regional, cultural, disciplinary and other epistemic differences impact our understanding of, and sensitivity to, different norms and practices?

Our goal is to create outputs that are useful to the research community at large. Such outputs may provide context and support education, identify previously unknown research and publishing vulnerabilities, help to inform academic evaluation criteria, and enable policy-making to support research and publishing workflows.

Apply now

Leiden University is now actively recruiting for the position. The vacancy can be found here. We invite interested candidates to submit their application by May 13.

We are very excited about our collaboration and eventual findings and outcomes. We look forward to starting the research later this year and to developing a deeper understanding of this complex and dynamic landscape.

Header image by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash.