I thought this excerpt from Endocrine Connections would be of interest as it has a bearing on the state of thyroidologic papers printed today in various journals.
Unless these fraudulent papers are stopped, progress in medicine is severely hampered unless the small amount of wheat is separated from the large amount of chaff. In thyroidology, the danger is falsely supporting the now discredited notion of thyroid function and diagnosis by bogus data. Below is the excerpt from the editorial:
One of the major concerns of any scientific journal is that the research it publishes should be reproducible. There have been many alarming estimates for the lack of reproducibility of work published in the biomedical sciences, which has led to widespread trends to require authors to provide more detailed descriptions of methods and reagent sourcing and sharing, a frequent call for deposition of original data in open access databanks, and possibly a greater willingness to publish negative or conflicting results. These efforts are based on the reasonable expectation that the research in question has been performed in good faith.
Very occasionally, one encounters a paper in which some of the data is falsified. This can range from, for example, the relatively benign exclusion of outliers in a dataset for spurious reasons or use of an inappropriate control. Reviewers and editors do their best to identify such occurrences and to remedy them. It has been very rare, however, to encounter entirely falsified manuscripts – until recently.
The pressure to publish for early career scientists and clinicians is intense, and career advancement and income are commonly dependent on this. One should not be surprised, therefore, that the phenomenon of the paper mill has emerged in recent years (1). This is a covert organization that, for a fee, will provide a seemingly credible and data-rich paper, and in some cases will even manage the submission and response to reviewer stages. Several journals have identified these submissions, which are often characterized by a fairly comprehensive series of experiments exploring (typically, but not exclusively) a microRNA and its effect on a biological phenomenon via a specific signaling process. Almost exclusively in our experience, these papers originate from clinical departments in China, with the authors (who inevitably seem to lack institutional email addresses or ORCID iDs) never having published a paper before.
New paper published by our advisers
