Metadata analysis of retracted fake papers in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology

Jonathan Wittau · Roland Seifert

15 citations0/0 files storedNaunyn-Schmiedeberg s Archives of Pharmacology

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Academic integrity and plagiarism scientometrics and bibliometrics research Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

An increasing fake paper problem is a cause for concern in the scientific community. These papers look scientific but contain manipulated data or are completely fictitious. So-called paper mills produce fake papers on a large scale and publish them in the name of people who buy authorship. The aim of this study was to learn more about the characteristics of fake papers at the metadata level. We also investigated whether some of these characteristics could be used to detect fake papers. For that purpose, we examined metadata of 12 fake papers that were retracted by Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (NSAP) in recent years. We also compared many of these metadata with those of a reference group of 733 articles published by NSAP. It turned out that in many characteristics the fake papers we examined did not differ substantially from the other articles. It was only noticeable that the fake papers came almost exclusively from a certain country, used non-institutional email addresses more often than average, and referenced dubious literature significantly more often. However, these three features are only of limited use in identifying fake papers. We were also able to show that fake papers not only contaminate the scientific record while they are unidentified but also continue to do so even after retraction. Our results indicate that fake papers are well made and resemble honest papers even at the metadata level. Because they contaminate the scientific record in the long term and this cannot be fully contained even by their retraction, it is particularly important to identify them before publication. Further research on the topic of fake papers is therefore urgently needed.

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References

2012Predatory publishers are corrupting open access 2017Publish or impoverish 2021The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science 2022Retracted papers originating from paper mills: cross sectional study 2016Toward the Discovery of Citation Cartels in Citation Networks 2020Digital magic, or the dark arts of the 21 st century—how can journals and peer reviewers detect manuscripts and publications from paper mills?2016Perish or Publish in China: Pressures on Young Chinese Scholars to Publish in Internationally Indexed Journals 2020Does retraction after misconduct have an impact on citations? A pre–post study

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