Previously I wrote about the Tadpole Paper Mill and the Stockphoto Paper Mill papers. Paper Mills are companies that sell fake or plagiarized scientific papers to authors who need them for their career. Certain countries have strict requirements or monetary incentives for medical doctors, graduate students, or other researchers to publish papers. In such countries, other researchers or business folks have found creative ways of making money by selling fake papers to researchers. Such paper mills are similar to essay mills where ghostwriters offer their services to undergraduate students.
Paper mill papers sometimes can be recognized because they are written based on templates or by recycling the same photos. A particular set of papers might contain the same remarkable typo, western blots with the same background, similar title structures, the same erroneous gene sequence, unrealistic flow cytometry plots, or recycled electron microscopy photos.
Other paper mills operate by working together with journal editors responsible for ‘special issues’ who will review and accept low-quality submissions where authors have been added for payment.
Countless hours have been put into finding such linked sets of papers by volunteers such as Smut Clyde, Tiger, Jennifer Byrne, Jana Christopher, and Anna Abalkina. Here, we will look at a slightly different paper mill.
A new paper mill involving plants sampled in Iran
A tweet by Norbert Holstein, @dr_norb, led to a set of papers describing plants collected in Iran.
The “Iranian Plant Paper Mill” [Google Sheets – 57 70 papers as per September 2022] contains plant sampling locations that are shared between papers. Although the coordinates are the same across papers, the names of the locations (cities, provinces, regions) as well as the researchers or plant species vary. If one does a Google Scholar search on ‘altitude 165 159 1133 1139 2383 Iran’, there are 40 results, many of which might be from the same paper mill. The locations given in the table usually do not match those given on the map that is included in many of the papers, although both are showing Iran.
In addition, the locations often including impossible latitudes and longitudes, such as 38 ̊52’93” latitude and 47 ̊25’92” longitude. In these examples, the last number is seconds, so it cannot be higher than 59.
Science ‘detectives’ Hoya camphorifolia, Stericta loxophaea, and Scythris inertella (pseudonyms) found many more similarities between these papers, such as shared TCS networks or phylogenetic trees. This is quite unexpected, given that these papers had different sets of authors analyzing different plant species.
Several of these papers contain agarose gels with duplicated or altered lanes, which are sometimes re-used in other papers.
Other papers in this set contain tables with the same genetic distances values found in other papers in this set, as illustrated in the screenshot below. What are the chances that different groups of researchers working on different plants using different sets of primers would all find the same genetic diversity values?
The first and corresponding authors are primarily from China, from different institutions, with co-authors from Iran. The corresponding email addresses do not always match the corresponding author’s name.
Paper mill AND citation ring
Many of these papers seem to have in common citing the same papers by S.M. Esfandani-Bozchaloyi and M. Khayatnezhad, perhaps as part of a citation ring.
The topics of these citations do not always belong in the papers citing them, suggesting that the paper mill might have been set up not only to sell papers, but also to increase the citation index of these authors.
Following papers that cite older papers by Esfandani-Bozchaloyi or Majid Khayatnezhad might lead to several more members of this set. I will update the numbers as I am finding more of these.
Science Integrity Digest 