This article in Nature of 2021 starkly analyses the flood of papers (paper mills) that are threatening to flood the literature with dishonest wrong work. It is for only the benefit of loading the paper-weight evidence for a scientist trying to keep in work and up against the pernicious "number of papers = likelihood of grant to carry on". Depressing reading. However, you won't find that in our group I can assure you. We have more self-respect than cheat.
Nature
23 March 2021
The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science
Written by
diogenes
Remembering
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Thank you very much diogenes. It is not surprising that many companies are more interested in profits than healing awful symptoms some people can develop.
Thankfully we have doctors like yourself and your colleagues who are also very knowledgeable and want to restore good health to patients.
This is an excerpt from the following link:-
"When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the executive editor at the journal. “I was determined to try to get to the bottom of what was going on.”
A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are still under investigation
Thank you diogenes as always, for all your hard work to give us true information. I'm currently starting the dissertation stage of an MRes in Health Research that I've been completing on and off (due to poor health) over the last 3 and a half years. I've had to think very seriously about whether this is actually a career I want to pursue due to these issues and they seem to have ramped up over the last 3 years in addition to the Covid related papers where researchers have been 'bought' to provide supposed evidence of the "science" that the govts and big pharma have been telling everyone that they should be following. It just makes a farce of real science that I feel so passionate about. Of which, almost nothing is black and white. Great to see the editors admitting the issue now but I fear as AI becomes more intricate and intelligent, we are going to see more and more of these papermill studies that will be much harder to recognise that it's going to get to a point where no researcher (particularly health researchers) is trusted. Hopefully AI to check papers will progress faster or at least keep up with the AI that produces it.
Painting by numbers. This stuff reminds me of a few years ago ‘artists’ went round houses/estates/towns peddling ‘authentic’ art. As an artist myself I was pretty much able see the ‘scam’ but lots of people bought the stuff. Probably most were very happy having invested in ‘real’ art. Whilst a bit annoying for artists; nothing like as damaging as this stuff. Scam, scams and more scams. What a mess we are getting into as a society.
Thanks for sharing. When much of health and social care practice is urged to be based on best evidence, this 2021 publication horrifies me, it puts the spotlight on a massive amount of fake research that managed to get widely published. How many systematic reviews have been unintentionally biased? How much more sham research is out there influencing various aspects of governance, practice, economics and life?
An issue of great concern. When reading studies I try not to discriminate, not to judge the paper by its origin. On the other hand a country that fails to patrol its researchers, or has policies which promote fraud invites discrimination. For example, we didn't allow the importation of ducks from China because of avian 'flu even though perhaps only a few ducks were dangerous. Quite reasonable, but scientific fraud has the potential to kill a lot more people than a roast duck.
As an example I saw a recent paper that described a well conducted study, it had ethical approval and references that had been well thought out and discussed. A lot of effort to go to if it were a sham study. The lead author worked at a USA university before moving to Beijing. All looks well.
My concerns are that the results are quite different to previous studies with high levels of significance and very little overlap between the study cohorts and the controls. Suspicious but previous studies were smaller and not very well designed.
What to do? Difficult to know whether to accept the study. I guess it comes down to the old rule that scientific results must be reproducable, other teams need to carry out similar studies to confirm the results.
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Myxedema Madness - Systematic literature review of published case reports 
