[HN Gopher] Paper mills: the 'cartel-like' companies behind frau...
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Paper mills: the 'cartel-like' companies behind fraudulent
scientific journals
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-10-23 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| warner25 wrote:
| As a current PhD candidate, I have two thoughts:
|
| 1. Who is this for? My program doesn't have a publication
| requirement, but it's sort of an implicit expectation and it
| helps to definitively answer the question of whether I've made
| substantial contributions to my field (so it takes some pressure
| off of my committee in deciding whether I should graduate). So,
| yeah, I need publications. But my advisor and committee members
| know full-well what I'm working on. I can't just point to three
| random papers with my name on them (along with the names of other
| people they don't know) about things like "the activity of ground
| beetles attacking crops in Kazakhstan." That would demand a lot
| of... explanation. My advisor who will be up for tenure next year
| also needs publications, but again, how would this help him?
|
| 2. Nevermind outright fraud; during my literature review I've
| come across a number of astonishingly crappy papers in what
| appear to be legitimate journals and conference proceedings,
| bearing the names of reputable organizations like the IEEE. I'm
| talking about stuff that's almost totally unintelligible, like it
| was written by a bot in, say, Chinese and then run through
| machine translation into English without any human editing it
| (back before bots and machine translation got much better with
| LLMs). On one hand, I look at what gets accepted into the top-
| tier conferences and journals and I feel like I can't possibly
| compete; like I'm a raw amateur baseball player batting against
| MLB pitchers. But then I see some of what gets into these lower-
| tier venues that I've previously never heard of, and I'm like,
| "Ok, I can do much better than this!"
| Scriddie wrote:
| Many programs have explicit (and often ridiculously high - e.g.
| 3+ first-author papers for a PhD) publication requirements. On
| top of this, many evaluation committees for grants, tenure,
| etc. simply count papers as opposed to actually reading them,
| leading to distorted incentives.
| jampekka wrote:
| 3+ papers requirement is the norm in many/most fields in
| Finland at least. Leads to lots of papers, which is probably
| not a good thing.
| adamc wrote:
| When I was a postdoc, my office-mate referred to them as
| LPUs -- "least publishable units". Squeeze as many papers
| as possible out of each real idea or achievement.
|
| It contributed a lot toward my fleeing academia.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I bet the real rationale behind this, at least for most,
| is so they can continue to work on whatever areas they
| are legitimately interested in pursuing at a pace that
| has a hope of uncovering some new knowledge.
|
| Data Driven = False Proxy
| HKH2 wrote:
| Can't they be curated?
| orochimaaru wrote:
| 4-5 conference and 1-2 journal were the requirements for me
| in the US. Conference had to be decently competitive IEEE
| or ACM and good journals. Picking something random would
| have gotten me into trouble with my advisor and committee.
|
| So yeah - paper mills exist. But it's the job of your
| advisor to block you from going down that road.
|
| Now if your advisor himself is on that path I'd say you
| should exit your PhD. There is nothing worthwhile to be
| done there.
| warner25 wrote:
| Yeah, I get that people need papers. I just don't see how
| paying to have one's name added to a sham paper with a
| handful of other unrelated paying customers could possibly
| help to meet that requirement.
|
| If I told my committee that I got another paper accepted, and
| it was one of these papers, and they so much as _glanced_ at
| the title and co-authors, they 'd be like, "wtf?" And my
| academic career would be irreparably ruined.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That probably serves as an indicator that some programs
| _aren 't_ so much as glancing at the title and co-authors.
| sephrenra wrote:
| My university (in Central Europe) also has extremely high
| requirements for a PhD, even students that have 5-6 first-
| author papers have to fight with their supervisors to let
| them graduate. Part of the problem is that supervisors are
| automatically co-authors and are incentivised to get as many
| papers as possible out of their students.
| oersted wrote:
| At least in the EU, in public universities (most of the top
| universities are public), publishing papers and getting
| citations are critical metrics for getting grants and any kind
| of position.
|
| Post-docs often need to get a grant to fund their position in a
| group, open positions are rare. Usually, it's not the
| university paying you, you bring in the money from a public
| funding application, and the university and your supervisor
| take a cut. These positions tend to last at most 3 years, then
| you need to do it all over again to get a new position, often
| in a totally different country, and repeat that for 10-15 years
| until you are able to get tenure somewhere, or some other kind
| of semi-permantent position like assistant professor.
|
| Then once you have tenure, if you want to advance your career
| and start a research group, you need to keep getting bigger
| grants for PhD and Post-doc positions within the group.
|
| For all of this getting publication "points" is absolutely
| critical. The situation in academia right now is horribly
| competitive and metrics focused, for "fairness". Frankly,
| society pushed too many people onto studying pure sciences, and
| we really don't need that many full-time researchers and
| professors, relatively speaking, with the upmost respect of
| publicly funded R&D. So it's not hard to (extort) make
| researchers pay to get their work published, instead of the
| other way around.
|
| Of course, the reputation of the journal or conference counts,
| but these paper-mills can reduce the risk of not getting
| published and give you a chance to at least get some citations.
| warner25 wrote:
| I can see how the following "services" would be helpful to a
| desperate academic:
|
| 1. Paying to have one's legitimate manuscript accepted,
| instead of going through the normally time-consuming and
| capricious process of reviews and revisions and re-
| submissions.
|
| 2. Paying to build up the citation count for existing
| publications.
|
| But the what the article is describing seems to be well
| beyond that and crazy.
| stephantul wrote:
| IME, and as the article also kind of says: paper mills target
| academics from developing countries. Academics who have trouble
| competing because of lack of funds, or lack of proper support
| from their universities, language barriers, cultural barriers,
| etc.
|
| As you mention, being in academia is tough. Some people just
| can't compete, and then get lured into accepting offers like
| these. In a way, I think this is similar to how vulnerable
| government officials get bribed. It's not something you do
| unless you're rock bottom, and don't see anywhere else to go.
| lindboe wrote:
| With respect to [2] - I think this is partially our garden-
| variety, universal impostor syndrome, but not only that: even
| otherwise good papers can be written so poorly as to be nearly
| incomprehensible, and still get published! I've come across
| papers that seem to be genuinely valuable and interesting work,
| but the amount of mental manual labor required on the reader's
| part is horribly daunting - mishandling or absence of
| grammatical articles ("a", "the", etc.), inconsistent spelling,
| a feeling of constant ambiguity of meaning...
|
| I have great sympathy for the many excellent scientists who
| have to overcome a language barrier to get published, since the
| lingua franca of virtually every major journal is English. It's
| not inherently bad that "the language of science is bad
| English"; these difficulties are a symptom of pulling together
| good science from everywhere in the world. I'm just deeply
| irritated with the publishers - IEEE in particular, though the
| fault is by no means theirs alone - who don't care to keep up a
| copyediting standard for their allegedly high-quality
| publications, since apparently their goal is not to communicate
| science well, but instead to make a profit.
|
| (I distinctly remember one of my favorite math professors
| stating, in no uncertain terms, that the words "a" and "the"
| each have different connotations with respect to existence and
| uniqueness. Incorrect use of either would get points knocked
| off of your proof.)
| raincom wrote:
| The existential quantifier([?]) and the unique existential
| quantifier ([?]!) of Predicate logic correspond to "a" and
| "the".
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Who is this for?
|
| People at dubious institutions in Europe and Asia. They get
| high status by having lots of papers. They then get awards and
| grant money. And get to be on senior level committees, etc.
|
| For a lot of them, academia is a stepping stone to something
| bigger.
| antegamisou wrote:
| > People at dubious institutions in Europe and Asia. They get
| high status by having lots of papers. They then get awards
| and grant money. And get to be on senior level committees,
| etc.
|
| There are currently labs from T-20 institutions in the US
| that do the exact same as well.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| It's pretty much in the article as many countries (not just
| those listed) massively incentivise quantity over quality of
| publications, and anyway quality is hard to judge and the
| proxies used are relatively easy to game. A paper mill combined
| with plagiarism, a citation ring and a bit of deliberately
| overly complicated exposition (or just plain lack of writing
| skill) supports many a career in academia I'm afraid.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| Not that you should but reading your comment had me think of
| doing a meta study on the most crappy papers in your field.
|
| Perhaps include as many as possible and attempt to [politely]
| categorize them.
|
| There should be plenty of opportunty for interesting
| conversation/networking and lots of help available.
| jampekka wrote:
| > By paying around EUR180 to EUR5000 (approximately US$197 -
| $5472), a person can have their name listed as the author of
| research paper, without having to painstakingly do research and
| write the results.
|
| That's quite a bargain compared to "reputable" publishers who
| take similar amounts to do not much more than holding a paywall.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The darkly humorous dystopian side effect of this trend is that a
| large number of influential TED talks have been spreading
| misinformation with citations to scientific studies that cannot
| be replicated.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Which tells you about the quality of TED talks.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's analogous to the American history channel being taken
| over by discussions of aliens :D
| asdff wrote:
| Well before that it was called the hitler channel
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| The article mostly centers on 2023 and onwards as an increase
| in trend. But anyone who has seen a TED talk over the last 10
| years is right to have ample suspicion about anything anyone
| says that does not fall under their direct, day to day job. A
| lot of it is people trying to make lateral, far-reaching
| connections into things they have no idea about, and package it
| into some kind of TED-paced equivalent of Hero's Journey.
| Anecdotes dressed up to be sold to thought leaders who push
| unfounded conclusions onto unsuspecting innocents. Nasty stuff.
|
| So it's not so much about studies which cannot be replicated,
| but shit that sounded off key to begin with.
|
| TYFAMTT.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Why is the text below the top picture in Indonesian?
| croisillon wrote:
| good one, apparently it's an older article recycled:
| https://theconversation.com/mengenal-cara-kerja-paper-mill-p...
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >no well-run journal can give such a guarantee
|
| Perhaps. But thanks to MDPI and Hindawi the guarantee is
| implicitly there (as long as the APC is paid) with most
| institutions being fine considering the publications made in one
| of their journals in one's CV.
| rainworld wrote:
| >cartel-like
|
| Billion dollar pot calling the small fry kettle black. Scientific
| publishing used to be like this (and may still be in some fields)
| and this state of affairs didn't come into being by accident:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
|
| Yes, that Robert Maxwell. Israeli[0] arch-spook. Father of
| Ghislaine and other spooked up kids.
|
| [0]: Fair to call them his primary customers but he's had others.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| the entire industry of scientific paper lifecycle is a horrid
| mess, a poisoned well that must be destroyed.
|
| There are multiple paths as far garbage papers, like not reading
| what is cited, LLM generated content, data falsification, buying
| a spot on a paper like this article describes, and so on.
|
| Authors produce garbage papers. Peer reviewers do not review.
| Journals demand large amounts of monies to publish and read.
| Researchers do not read, therefore cite garbage papers. This
| results in wrong results, authoring garbage papers. Rinse,
| repeat.
|
| I do not know how to fix this, considering the vast amount of
| garbage papers already published. How do we filter them out?
| Ekaros wrote:
| It all comes down to funding... But fixing that would lead to
| other problems like nepotism "thought" leaders steering most of
| the funding to their pet directions. Possibly ignoring solid
| science or other research avenues.
|
| Maybe we just need to cut down number of participants in some
| way.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| What do we do about the wide scale data fraud/falsification at
| top conferences like NeurIPS? It's a toss up on any paper on if
| their results are real or not, and like it or not, I think many
| authors of the papers know that and make it harder on purpose
| to "reproduce" their work.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Recently I've noticed new scam journals with "Austin" in their
| name.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Paper mills helped us get AI-generated diagrams of rats with
| priapic erections that were larger than the entire rest of their
| bodies. I'm just saying SOME good came out of this hellmouth.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| If a study is goverment funded it seems gov should also review
| what we paid for. It shouldnt take very long for gov review in a
| field to earn a reputation?
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