ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of stroke blood biomarker data highlights need for more translational research methods.Nature communications · 2026Pooled it
- High prevalence of articles with image-related problems in animal studies of subarachnoid hemorrhage and low rates of correction by publishers.PLoS biology · 2025Pooled it
- Authors, reviewers, editors… smitten and bitten by the artificial intelligence (AI) bug!Indian journal of anaesthesia · 2026Article
- AI will reorganize science. Will research remain a human enterprise?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Strengthening Australia's research integrity system.Internal medicine journal · 2026Article
- Large Language Models and the Future of Peer-Reviewed Medical Publishing: Challenges, Editorial Responses, and a Framework for Responsible Integration.Journal of Korean medical science · 2026Review
- Curbing the tide of "paper mills": A risk-based integrated governance for public health databases.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2026Article
- Publication integrity and industry influences on the editorial process: a case study.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- The Challenges of Scientific Publishing: An Editor-In-Chief's Perspective.Fundamental & clinical pharmacology · 2026Article
- Article
- Research integrity within systematic reviews: investigating the prevalence of studies by authors with multiple retraction histories in Cochrane reviews.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Review
- AI in Drug Discovery: Clinical Failures, Regulatory Reality, and the Validation Crisis Behind the Hype.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Article
- Introducing COSIG: The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Why does research integrity affect us all?European heart journal. Cardiovascular pharmacotherapy · 2026Article
- Quantifying new threats to health and biomedical literature integrity from rapidly scaled publications and problematic research.Journal of clinical epidemiology · 2026Article
- Journal of Global Health's GUidelines for Authors on Requesting and DIsclosing changes in Authorship Nominations (GUARDIAN).Journal of global health · 2026Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos-i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce-the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities-paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions-that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.