Paper mills: the 'cartel-like' companies behind fraudulent scientific journals
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
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!"
It contributed a lot toward my fleeing academia.
Data Driven = False Proxy
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.
Although, again, it probably depends a lot on the field. Someone with a biology PhD told me that she wouldn't even list a conference paper on her CV, because only journal articles matter. In computer security, I think that even IEEE and ACM journals get the "scraps" that don't get accepted into conferences, or they get previously accepted conference papers that have been extended with 20-30% more material.
For the papers on which you weren't the lead author, were those incorporated into your dissertation or defense at all? I'm still unclear on how that's supposed to work. I'm the second author on a couple things that are related to my dissertation topic, but not part of my dissertation draft as of now (I just cite them where it's appropriate). I would at least mention them during my defense when giving an overview of my complete body of work, but maybe that's it. My own advisor actually did his dissertation on a topic that was unrelated to the three papers he got published during his time as a PhD student. Apparently, his advisor was satisfied with that output and proof that he could do research and publish, and let him spend his final year on a project for his dissertation that put him into a more marketable area.
I would say I was about a 45% contributor as in the core idea was my advisors by I still did a LOT of work on them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
There are currently labs from T-20 institutions in the US that do the exact same as well.
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.
I do hope you follow retraction watch. Even that tier of publication is not immune to fraud, no matter how well put together it appears.
I often met academics from other institutions, though, who complained about pressure from higher administrators to raise their publication numbers, and I occasionally met administrators who seemed to see their primary job as being to raise the numbers of the faculty and researchers under them.
I am proud that my university was the first in Japan to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which advocates assessing research on its own merits, not on quantitative metrics [1].
In every other case, the defense seemed like a formality; like the committee had mostly made their decision before giving the go-ahead to schedule the defense. One of those defenses was really rough - I thought the guy had failed - but he passed and graduated a few weeks later as planned.
To be clear, I don't (yet) know of anyone who reached the point of having a defense, failed it, and ultimately dropped out or got eliminated from the program.
I think you're describing the process of putting together a dissertation proposal, and I think it might be the hardest part of getting a PhD. To do that, one first needs to acquire a broad knowledge of the field (which is what the qualifying exams are testing after one finishes all the required coursework) so that one can read papers and understand them. Then one needs to do a deep literature review of a narrow area to see where there are gaps or opportunities. And then one needs to come up with ideas to address those gaps and opportunities. The proposal is the presentation of all this, and the committee decides whether it is worthy (novel, impactful, etc.) or not. That can take a few years. Once the proposal is approved, one "just" needs to execute on the ideas; that's still a lot of work (like years of work), and could easily go off-the-rails or show that early assumptions were invalid or whatever, but I think it's more straightforward than trying to brainstorm worthy research ideas (that are appropriately scoped for a PhD) in the first place.
One way to get in trouble at the defense seems to be deviating too much from the proposal without keeping the committee members informed. Or people have turnover on their committee, so the people who approved the proposal aren't the same people at the defense. In theory, these problems should still surface before a public defense is scheduled; like if committee members are surprised or have questions, that should come up in private and be resolved before there's any public embarrassment on either side. In the two ugly cases I saw, people basically weren't communicating with each other due to personal grievances, so this didn't happen.
> I guess the defense is more about establishing whether the work is really your own and you didn't have other people do the work that you don't understand.
I don't think so. Those things are too fundamental and shouldn't even be in question. I'd say that the defense is mostly about tradition. After that, I think it's mostly about one's ability to clearly communicate the work. In theory, a PhD should be able to teach, so it kind of tests one's ability to go out into the world and do that while representing the committee / department / school in a positive manner.
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?
Maybe we just need to cut down number of participants in some way.
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.
So it’s not so much about studies which cannot be replicated, but shit that sounded off key to begin with.
TYFAMTT.
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.
That's quite a bargain compared to "reputable" publishers who take similar amounts to do not much more than holding a paywall.