(Hot Air)—Moore’s law was really a prediction that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would continue to double every two years. There was no guarantee this would happen but it has in fact proven true over the last 50 years. Moore’s law is really a tribute to the sustained innovation of engineers around the globe.
Now there’s a new prediction highlighted by some research into scientific papers that arise from what are known as paper mills. These are often bogus papers of no real value that are published by a growing number of journals who exist to churn out qualifications for a cadre of scientists, some of whom simply pay to have their names added despite having done no work whatsoever.
A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.
“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday…
Organizations known as paper mills are now turning scientific fraud into a lucrative business. Scientists eager to pad out their resumes can pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to be named as an author of a paper that they had nothing to do with, according to Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at Free University of Berlin who studies paper mills…
Even as paper mills have worked to keep their efforts hidden, Dr. Abalkina has traced the output of companies in Russia, Iran and other countries, and found thousands of their papers in print. “You learn to see the patterns,” she said.
The study looked at a database of a million papers and identified about 30,000 that appeared to be fraudulent. But that number could be very low. It takes time to parse and identify bogus papers. Dr. Amaral used a statistical model to estimate how many more might be out there and found it could be 100 times more than have been uncovered thus far. In other words we may only know about 1% of the fraud that is already part of the system.
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