Scientific fraud is a growing crisis in academic publishing. Although the total number of scientific articles doubles roughly every 15 years, the number thought to be fraudulent has doubled every 1.5 years since 2010, according to a study published in PNAS in August 2025 by a team led by Luís Nunes Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern University.
The fraud is driven largely not by lone cheats but by companies known as paper mills, which prepare fake scientific papers full of made-up experiments and bogus data—often with the help of AI—and sell authorship to academics looking to boost their publication numbers.
The PNAS study analysed PLOS ONE, an enormous and generally well-regarded journal that identifies which of its 18,329 editors is responsible for each paper. Since 2006, the journal has published 276,956 articles, of which 702 have been retracted and 2,241 have received critical comments on PubPeer, a site that allows academics and online sleuths to raise concerns.
The study found 45 editors who facilitated the acceptance of retracted or flagged articles far more frequently than would be expected by chance. Though responsible for just 1.3% of submissions, they were responsible for 30.2% of retracted articles. More than half were themselves authors of papers later retracted by the journal, and they regularly suggested each other as editors for their own submissions. Nature subsequently identified five of the editors; PLOS ONE says all five were investigated and dismissed between 2020 and 2022.
A 2024 investigation by RetractionWatch and Science found that paper mills have bribed editors in the past.
The problem is particularly concerning in medical fields. A paper in the BMJ found that 8-16% of conclusions in systematic reviews that included later-retracted evidence ended up being wrong—meaning fraudulent papers can influence clinical guidelines.
Publication counts and citation metrics have become powerful proxies for academic achievement, creating incentives to commit fraud that outweigh the consequences of discovery. Some journals make more money the more articles they accept. Databases such as Scopus and Web of Science can "de-list" journals, ruining their reputations, but whether this pressure can keep pace with the paper mills remains unclear.
I'm sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.