The Wall Street Journal cries alarum: “Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures.”
Dozens of scientific journals have become paper mills—homes for rings of pseudo-academics to cite one another, review another, and puff up their publications with bogus research to secure the rewards of academic employment.
After it bought its Egyptian rival Hindawi, academic publisher Wiley shut down large numbers of Hindawi journals, which had become egregious malefactors. Scientists now use Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to detect fraudulent research papers—but it’s an arms race, with the fraudsters’ AI in a duel with the fraud-Javerts’ AI.
Professors have to use Turnitin and similar services to detect plagiarism and AI use by their students; they also have to use more sophisticated programs to detect when their peers are up to no good.
The Wall Street Journal makes it seem that this is mainly a Third World problem: “Researchers say they have found them [paper mills] in multiple countries including Russia, Iran, Latvia, China and India.” American researchers have their own problems, including massive amounts of irreproducible research, but the paper mill fakery seems distinctive.
Western researchers may, as a rule of thumb, simply ignore all Third-World research by scientists they don’t personally know. But only an optimist would think that American science will remain immune to such trends—particularly when a good majority of American graduate students in the hard sciences hail from abroad.
American scientific culture is becoming the scientific culture of China and India.
Proposed technical solutions abound,but all assume that the science cops can get the jump on the science criminals, and that somehow science can function when no scientist can trust another. These technical solutions should be pursued. But the ultimate solution is simply to stop government funding of scientific research for ten or twenty years and hire science professors solely for their ability to teach.
Cut off the money for long enough, and the only people doing science will be those who actually care about it for its own sake.It would be nice if a milder fix would work, but the incentives for science parasites are deep-rooted. Nothing less may be enough.
Image by Natasha — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 511869187
Leave a Reply