Fake research is doubling every 1.5 years | Hacker News Reader

Fake research is doubling every 1.5 years

3 pointsrecoveringphd6 comments

Paper mills, which are companies that sell fake papers to academics desperate for publications, have industrialized scientific fraud.

A new study shows paper mills now double their output every 1.5 years. Real research, by contrast, only doubles every 15 years. If you follow the math, fake science eventually outnumbers real science.

This is a huge problem because scientific literature is upstream of everything: drug discovery, clinical guidelines, and increasingly, AI training data.

If fake papers keep scaling, we’re polluting downstream systems, including scientific AI.

Peer review was designed for a world where misconduct was rare and individual. It has no defenses against industrialized fraud.

Scientific publishing is collapsing. So what comes next?

> This is a huge problem because scientific literature is upstream of everything: drug discovery, clinical guidelines, and increasingly, AI training data.

Paper published in bad journals are simply ignored by serious researchers, including drug discovery and clinical guidelines.

I'm not sure about AI training, but if they don't they will have soon a nasty surprise and will have to reinvent impact factor, h-index and a few additional stupid metrics that everyone use to try to ignore all the crap that is published in bad journals (and no so bad journals).

> So what comes next?

Since you provided a source for your numbers, I'll bite. Formalize results into mechanical proofs that can be verified by computers so that we build a library of computer proofs. You can't bullshit a computer.

I'm not sure how it would work for statistical results, but defining a formalized standard might be a good first step for deriving numbers from raw data instead of relying on the authors to calculate the statistics themselves.

Not that I disagree with your numbers, but do you have any sources for your numbers of paper mills doubling output every 1.5 years vs real research doubling every 15 years?

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

this is not a issue created by AI or paper mil, it's created by unhealthy review system. Don't blame AI!

Is that real research or fake research?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com