In our last standard episode, we talked about retraction—removing papers from the scientific literature. Well, it turns out there’s an awful lot of retraction to do, in large part due to paper mills. These are fraudulent enterprises that take money from nefarious scientists to put their name on fake scientific papers, and get them published in whatever journal will accept them. Sadly, paper mill papers are now rife.

In this solo episode of The Studies Show (Tom is away at a wedding), Stuart talks through a new paper showing just how badly these paper mills have poisoned the scientific literature.

Show notes

* The new PNAS paper using various techniques to examine coordinated attempts at scientific fraud

* A response from PLOS

* The Retraction Watch article on ARDA

* A few interesting recent articles on paper mills

* The Nature News article on the universities with the most retractions

* AI versus paper mills

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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Episode 82: Paper mills

Science Fictions