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.
Continue reading “The Iranian Plant Paper Mill”
Science Integrity Digest 