Paper mill cancer studies get double the number of citations as genuine papers

Credit: WIN-Initiative/Neleman/Getty Cancer research articles with telltale signs of being produced by paper mills garner double the number of citations than do genuine papers in the field, finds an analysis of tens of thousands of articles 1 . In a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv, the authors report that papers that were probably produced by paper mills frequently cite, or are cited by, other potentially fraudulent articles. Paper mills are businesses that produce and sell low-quality manuscripts — often containing fabricated data and results — designed to resemble genuine research. Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues say that their analysis indicates that coordinated citation manipulation is inflating the impact metrics of journals in molecular oncology. These metrics measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited in other research, among other things. In many nations, having papers published in journals with high impact factors is taken into account when researchers apply for jobs and funding. Research-integrity sleuths have long suspected that paper mills are inflating citations, says René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “But it’s nice to see this confirmed in such an elegant way,” he adds. …