Global publisher Wiley announced this month the discontinuation of 19 scientific journals, some of which have been affected by extensive research fraud. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, the number of paper retractions has reached a new high, with a significant portion coming from China’s underground paper mills, accounting for 55% of the global total.
Headquartered in the United States, global publisher Wiley has discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its subsidiary, Hindawi.
According to a Wiley spokesperson, in the past two years, the publisher has retracted more than 11,300 papers from the Hindawi collection.
Wiley did not solely attribute the discontinuation to research fraud this time, stating that it was caused by multiple factors and was part of an integration plan between Hindawi and Wiley’s product portfolios.
Established in 1807, Wiley has over two hundred years of history. In January 2021, Wiley acquired the publisher Hindawi, founded in Egypt in 1997, for $298 million. Hindawi has over 200 peer-reviewed scientific, technical, and medical journals.
At the time, Wiley anticipated that Hindawi’s inclusion would provide researchers with more options for publishing articles and offer better services to its partners. However, it was later discovered that Hindawi became embroiled in academic publishing scandals.
In 2022, thousands of papers from Hindawi journals were retracted for manipulating peer reviews. In March 2023, 19 Hindawi journals were removed from the Web of Science index due to failing to meet editorial quality standards. In May 2023, Wiley closed four Hindawi journals to alleviate “systemic operations in the publishing process.”
In December 2023, Wiley announced the discontinuation of the Hindawi brand name and the integration of approximately 200 Hindawi journals into Wiley’s 2,000-journal portfolio this year. Wiley also revealed that due to the inundation of paper mills with Hindawi journals, their latest quarterly revenue was $18 million lower compared to the same period last year.
The so-called paper mills are companies that accept commissions from clients to write academic papers. Clients typically provide information on the paper’s topic, length, desired completion time, etc., and pay accordingly. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the scope and intensity of academic fraud have been escalating.
According to a report in the British scientific journal Nature in December last year, the total number of retracted papers worldwide has exceeded 50,000. However, academic sleuths believe this may only be the tip of the iceberg of unqualified papers. It is estimated that the number of articles produced by paper mills could reach several hundred thousand.
Nature magazine’s analysis shows that the retraction rate (total retracted papers within a year/total published papers) has more than doubled in the past decade.
These large-scale fraudulent activities undoubtedly threaten the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
According to another report in Nature magazine in February this year, approximately 14,000 retraction statements were issued by all publishers in 2023, setting a new record.
The report stated that about three-quarters of these retractions involved Chinese scholars. Out of over 9,600 retracted papers from Hindawi alone, around 8,200 were from China. Since 2021, over 17,000 retracted papers have involved Chinese scholars.
China’s underground paper mills offer a full range of services from “ghostwriting” to “publication,” and papers ranging from ordinary journals to top international journals can be “produced,” with varying fees.
In May last year, neuroscientist Bernhard Sabel from the University of Magdeburg in Germany, together with other academics, published an investigative report titled “Alarm Signals Indicate Rampant Falsification of Biomedical Scholarly Papers” on the medical academic paper website medRxiv.
The report stated that between 2010 and 2020, the proportion of “suspected fraudulent papers” increased from 16% to 28%. Just in 2020, the estimated number of false papers in the biomedical field exceeded 300,000. The highest rates of false papers were from Russia, Turkey, China, Egypt, and India. However, in terms of quantity, China, due to its large number of papers, accounted for 55% of the global total.
The report mentioned that underground paper mills are primarily concentrated in China, India, Russia, the UK, and the USA. If calculated based on an average price of $10,000 per fake paper, the industry’s annual revenue could reach up to $3-4 billion. Not only do paper mills profit from this, but in some extreme cases, editors and publishers of some small journals also receive payments from authors.
As revealed by Sabel, he himself was once approached by a paper mill for recruitment, with substantial remuneration offered. “The temptation is quite significant; one could simply retire with that money,” he said.
Based on Sabel’s calculations, the estimated annual output value of China’s underground paper mills ranges between $1.65 billion and $2.2 billion. This estimation was based on 2020 data, and with the advent of artificial intelligence, the current scale of the industry is likely even higher.
The biomedical field has become a hotspot for paper fraud because Chinese doctors and scholars are judged on the quantity of papers they produce for promotion.
“The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” points out that the characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party is “fake, evil, and fighting.” Fake phenomena are pervasive in China. Even the CCP’s own official media admitted two years ago that everything from birth to death can be falsified. If even top international medical journals can contain fraudulent papers, it is evident that other areas are also affected.
Under this atmosphere of “anything can be faked,” people’s ways of thinking and behavior have undergone immense changes, and falsification has become commonplace, with trust between individuals nearly non-existent.
About three or four years ago, an immigrant from Guangdong, China, who had recently arrived in New Zealand, needed to obtain various proof documents. He told a reporter from Epoch Times that due to insufficient documents, he used a fake “real driver’s license” made in China.
The so-called fake real driver’s license refers to all the information on the license being genuine, but it is not officially produced; instead, it is made on the black market.
When asked why he didn’t seek an official license if all the information on the license was genuine, he replied that it was too troublesome to go through official channels. It not only costs a lot of money and takes a long time, but there is no guarantee of success in one attempt. On the other hand, licenses made on the black market are quick, cheap, and nearly indistinguishable from real ones.