Увлекательный материал про "рынок" научных статей.
Много иллюстраций, потому лучше читать оригинал по ссылке.
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Forbetterscience
The full-service paper mill and its Chinese customers
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#science@iridio
#international@iridio
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In China, clinicians are expected to publish a certain number of research papers in international journals if they want to be promoted. The easiest way is to pay a paper mill, which seem to provide a full service: an English-speaking research paper containing Photoshop-generated fake research data, in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, with your name on it. Entire journals published by Wiley or Elsevier succumb to such scams, presumably because certain corrupt editorial board members are part of it. This was uncovered in an investigation by Elisabeth Bik, as well as the pseudonymous Smut Clyde, Morty and Tiger BB8, and narrated below by Smut Clyde.
The presently 400 papers were traced to one specific paper mill not because of direct image reuse, but because the data showed same patterns of falsifications: same blot backgrounds, same shapes of bands, and similarly falsified flow cytometry plots.
The growing list of papers and affected journals is available here.
Apparently, the Chinese paper mills even handle submissions, peer review (if there is a peer review, that is) and sign the copyright consent forms while pretending to be the listed authors. This is evidenced by the fact that in some cases only bizarre Gmail addresses are provided for alleged corresponding authors in China. Gmail access, as all Google services, were blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall in 2014, on Party’s orders. It is theoretically possible to use Google via VPN, but the Party has criminalised this, so hardly anyone dares. Whoever answers the Gmail accounts like CaseyPeiffer8311@gmail.com is definitely not some doctor in China listed as paper’s author, but the paper mill operator.
The papers mills churning out masses of 100% fabricated, never performed science which only exists in Photoshop, are the secret of Chinese science output supremacy which we in the West so admire and strive to keep up with. Reality is: nobody cares if the published research is real, slightly falsified or entirely made-up. Fraudsters face little consequences if they are well-connected, and one can always denounce a western conspiracy. The good scientific practice lessons preached by Chinese science elites do not even apply to themselves, as the case of Xuetao Cao demonstrated.
The extra joke on top is that many of these fake paper mill emissions tout the alleged powers of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to cure cancer and other maladies, all because the nation’s President Xi Jinping himself is such a big fan of TCM. The Communist Party of China is merely getting what it ordered, again and again.
Maybe we in the West also should impose such idiotic laws? In fact, also in the “western” university hospitals, promotions depend on the publication record. So far, US, German and other doctors got ahead by gift authorships, self-plagiarism, and where needed, with outright plagiarism and falsified data. But actually, can we really be so sure that paper mills are an Asian phenomenon only?
When the count was at 320 (now 400), more than half of the mill papers came from the Shandong province, almost a fifth from Jilin and one tenth from Henan. This message was sent to Tiger BB8 by such a Chinese paper mill customer:
“Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible.
Being as low as grains of dust of the world, countless junior doctors, including those younger me, look down upon the act of faking papers. But the system in China is just like that, you can’t really fight against it. Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family. I also want to have some time to do scientific research, but it’s impossible. During the day, I have outpatient surgeries; after work, I have to take care of my kids. I have only a little bit time to myself after 10 pm, but this is far from being enough because scientific research demands big trunks of time. The current environment in China is like that.
You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same. As long as the system remains the same and the rules of the game remain the same, similar acts of faking data are for sure to go on. This time you exposed us, probably costing us our job. For the sake of Chinese doctors as a whole, especially for us young doctors, please be considerate. We really have no choice, please!”
Tiger BB8 found out even more. There are actually even open online advertisement for authorships on artificially generated scientific papers:
But then again, not everyone buys fake papers from paper mills. What about these honest doctors who don’t, do their careers not count? And if doctors cheat in research, where else will they cheat to improve their performance statistics? Will fictional TCM papers lead to real patient therapies, a predictable public health disaster?
One journal particularly hit by an organised paper mill scam is the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, published by Wiley. Its editorial board features many prominent US scientists, including the infamous Carlo Croce. For many years and up until mid-January 2020, the journal was run by an academic editor, the now 77-year-old Gary Stein. He stepped down, and the new temporary Editor-in-Chief is a Wiley employee Lucie Kalvodova. But when first concerns about falsified papers emerged, Stein wrote on 14 January 2020 to a whistleblower:
“Thank you for bringing these concerns to our attention. We will look further into the content of the article.“
In September 2019, Wiley opened a search for a new Editor-in-Chief, as referenced by this Chinese website. It makes sense: in recent journal editions, around 90% of papers have Chinese authors, as if there was some kind of pattern. Now Wiley announced to me to be investigating the goings-on at Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, and asked to share the list compiled by Bik and Smut Clyde. Also a Taylor & Francis publishing ethics manager was thankful and added:
“We’re looking into the affected articles as a matter of urgency.“
Update 28.01 and 6.02.2020. It is possible the paper mill is creating dud ORCID profiles for their customers, since some journals, like Journal of Cellular Biochemistry apparently expect ORCID identification. Smut Clyde collected a number of suspect cases, here some examples: Zhang et al 2018 and Zhang & Liu 2019 contain next to utterly phony Gmail addresses also empty ORCID profiles, created after the manuscripts were submitted (here and here).
Further evidence to ORCID fraud is provided by the fact that certain actors and recurrent paper mill customers sport multiple ORCID entries. A certain Yang Wang of Jilin University purchased 3 papers from the mill (Nr 17, 18 and 31 in the list), for which 2 ORCID ID were created (here and here). The duo Dexin Yin and Dajun Sun, also of Jilin, purchased 6 papers (Nr 40, 41, 70, 265, 273, 279), for which two throwaway ORCID profiles were created for each gentlemen (Yin vs Yin, Sun vs Sun). There are even different throwaway email addresses for the alleged corresponding authors, different in each Journal of Cellular Biochemistry paper:
Yin: yindexin221@sina.com, mudanren8646ktd@163.com
Sun: dajunsun0060@sina.com, sundajun0056@sina.com, sundajun221@sina.com
- 55 papers in Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, 15 in BioFactors, 18 in Journal of Cellular Physiology, 6 in Phytotherapy Research (Wiley);
- 42 in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, 26 in Experimental and Molecular Pathology, 10 in Life Sciences, 9 in International Immunopharmacology, 4 in International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (Elsevier);
- 26 in Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry (Karger, now self–published);
- 5 in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, 4 in Journal of Physiology and Biochemistry, 8 in BMC Cancer (Springer Nature);
- 12 in Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (SciELO);
- 7 in Oncology Research (Ingenta);
- 12 in International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology (SAGE);
- 5 in Cancer Biomarkers (IOS Press);
- 7 in Neoplasma (AEPress);
- 6 in European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences (self-published)
- whooping 76 papers in Artificial Cells Nanomedicine and Biotechnology (Taylor & Francis),
- plus other journals and publishers. Judging by signature made-up gel and flow cytometry data, all stemming from the same paper mill.
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Полная версия - доступна по ссылке
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https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/24/the-full-service-paper-mill-and-its-chinese-customers/