Brokers of scientific fraud growing rapidly, study finds

Companies that broker and facilitate scientific fraud are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, according to a new study. The analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on Aug. 4, examined the inner workings of the ARDA Conference, also known as the Academic Research and Development Association. ARDA is a paper mill—a site that lets academics add their names to already-written scientific papers that are accepted to be published in peer-reviewed journals. Paper mills don’t usually state the names of journals that papers will be published in, but ARDA does so, making it easier to study, says Reese Richardson, a biologist and research integrity expert at Northwestern University who coauthored the new analysis. In January 2018, ARDA listed 14 journals on its site; by March 2024, that figure had shot up to 86 publications. That’s despite efforts by databases like Web of Science and Scopus to deindex titles found to be cooperating with paper mills. Paper mills sometimes bribe journal editors to get them to publish poor-quality papers on which researchers have purchased authorships. Deindexing is often seen as an effective tool to counteract paper mills since academics are keen to publish in journals indexed in databases like Web of Science and Scopus. But Richardson says the strategy isn’t working as well as it should because paper mills seem to be growing in size and number. Nandita Quaderi, editor in chief for Web of Science and senior vice president of the analytics firm that operates it,