His name is David Bimler. But he is also known by his detective pseudonym. Clyde. Smut Clyde. A retired psychology researcher from Massey University in New Zealand, he is now a master in the art of spotting scientific fraud.
Recently, articles published in some chemistry journals caught his attention. Their subject: metallo-organic networks (MOF), chemical compounds used in particular for gas storage. According to this research, MOFs would reduce inflammation and kill cancer cells.
There was eel under rock.
The images and turns of phrase were strangely similar from one article to another. And the cited references were often unrelated to the content of the texts.
Some of these items had already been identified as suspect by researchers. So I started digging for other questionable publications on the subject. And everything fell apart.
David Bimler, retired psychology researcher
In a pre-publication study, David Bimler lists more than 800 articles on MOFs, all of which presumably come from the same firm specializing in scientific falsification. These companies are given the nickname of article factories, or paper mills. They sell their articles, usually stuffed with the results of fabricated experiments, to researchers in desperate search of scientific publications in their name.
The phenomenon is becoming more and more widespread. “The total number of articles published from these factories is difficult to estimate, but I would say that there are still at least 100,000 to be flushed out in the scientific literature”, assesses Jennifer Byrne, professor of molecular oncology at the University. from Sydney, Australia, and also a fraudulent science detective.
“It is more difficult for these companies to have their articles published in prestigious journals,” adds the professor. But it is almost certain that some manage to do so. »
Publish at all costs
Article factories target environments where researchers are under great pressure to publish. In the medical sector, especially in China, these companies abound.
“In China, all the scientific recognition of researchers is built around the number of publications, explains Vincent Larivière, professor of information sciences at the University of Montreal. They cannot be promoted if they have not published a certain number of articles in certain journals. It’s not really like that in Canada, so here there’s not a big problem with paper mills. »
Other regions such as Russia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe represent fertile ground for these companies, which solicit researchers on social networks or directly by email.
A lot of people make a ton of money with this, and it disgusts me. We are talking here, among other things, about cancer research. They should be used to develop better treatments for patients, not to enrich themselves.
Jennifer Byrne, Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Sydney
International Publisher LLC is one of the companies whose fraudulent activities have been repeatedly denounced by the scientific community. On the website of the company based in Russia, a list of articles ready for publication is put up for sale. For each article, the site provides a summary description and indicates the price it costs to appear as first author, second author, etc.
The Press attempted to contact International Publisher LLC by email for comment. The company did not respond.
The devil is in the details
“Articles from these factories are often written in such a way as to be very plausible,” notes Jennifer Byrne. And the peer review system is not perfect. It is not made to detect this kind of mass fraud. »
To find the articles that have slipped through the cracks, David Bimler and Jennifer Byrne collaborate in particular with Elisabeth Bik, a Californian microbiologist who has become a specialist in scientific integrity.
Using software, the researcher identifies images that are repeated from one scientific publication to another, one of the trademarks of article factories. Different signs also serve as indicators of suspicious searches: e-mail addresses of authors that do not correspond to their name, redundant phrases, certain characteristic graphic styles, etc.
“You have to detect the little mistakes that slip in,” she says. For example, I read an article from Hospital A that accidentally mentioned Hospital B, which was in a different city and had no connection to Hospital A. Searching, I found eight articles from different hospitals that had the same phrase. They had probably been written from the same model, forgetting the correction of this detail. »
Elisabeth Bik fears, however, that these indications of fraud will end up becoming too difficult to detect.
Item factories can use artificial intelligence, which gives increasingly convincing results. Among other things, they can generate very realistic images of scientific experiments.
Elisabeth Bik, microbiologist
According to the American researcher, journal publishers will need to be more aware of this industry, which undermines the credibility of genuine research. Elisabeth Bik would also like strict measures in countries like China and Russia to prevent these companies from advertising online.
Beyond these solutions, a great reflection is necessary on the conditions which allowed such a phenomenon to emerge, insists Vincent Larivière, of the University of Montreal. “Governments that have purely quantitative policies on scientific publication must realize that there are more perverse effects than positive ones,” he concludes. This is where you have to play. We must stop pushing researchers to publish, even when they have nothing to say. »
Some discoveries of presumed article factories in medicine
tadpole factory
In 2020, a team including Jennifer Byrne and another including David Bimler and Elisabeth Bik simultaneously identify a series of questionable publications from Chinese hospitals. In nearly 600 papers, Western blot images, a technique used to detect proteins, have a similar unnaturally clean style and feature similar shapes that resemble tadpoles.
The factory of the image bank
Also in 2020, Elisabeth Bik reports 121 articles, the majority published in the journal European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences (ERMPS). They use the same images, applying rotations, reflections or color changes, to describe their experiences.
Gene Factories
In 2021, Jennifer Byrne and her colleagues analyze articles published in two journals where suspicious publications had been reported in the past: Embarrassed and Oncology Reports. Out of 12,000 articles studied, more than 700 describe genetic sequences that contain errors. “We cannot say that all these publications come from article factories, but that seems to be the case for several of them”, estimates Jennifer Byrne.