More than 10,000 Research Papers Retracted in 2023, a New Record
There has been a rise of “paper mills”, which are businesses dedicated to pumping out fake or low-quality research for a fee, often to help researchers boost their portfolio of published material.
The number of scientific research papers that were retracted in 2023 exploded to more than 10,000, far surpassing previous records. For context, in 2022, about 5,500 papers were retracted. The magnitude of the increase was reported by Nature.
The bulk of retracted papers were published in special issues, which are frequently overseen by guest editors and which “have become notorious for being exploited by scammers to rapidly publish low-quality or sham papers,” according to Nature.
The proliferation of fake and shoddy research is a growing problem for the scientific community, which has become associated with a “publish or perish” paradigm. There has been a rise of “paper mills”, which are businesses dedicated to pumping out fake or low-quality research for a fee, often to help researchers boost their portfolio of published material. Recent estimates have put the percentage of papers submitted for publication by paper mills at anywhere from 2% to 20%.
Nature found that over the past two decades, the countries with the highest rates of retraction included Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, and China.
Retractions concentrated at Wiley
More than 8,000 of the retracted papers were published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of Wiley, a public U.S.-based company and the 4th largest journal publisher in the world with a $2B market capitalization. Subsequently, Wiley has said it will no longer use the Hindawi brand.
Editors working for Hindawi, along with internet sleuths identified “incoherent text and irrelevant references in thousands of papers,” which prompted investigations at the journal. In addressing the retractions, Hindawi expressed concerns “that the peer review process has been compromised.”
Although the majority of Hindawi’s retracted papers were fraudulent, they were still collectively cited more than 35,000 times, per an estimate from Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France who studies problems in scientific literature.
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