Fake papers from China are pouring out

Even if a great scientific discovery is made, it must be published in the form of a dissertation to be publicly recognized. However, as many fake papers have been submitted in China only to obtain the results that the paper has been published, the journal Nature has announced that after January 2020, there will be more than 1,000 papers suspected of being fake papers.

In January 2021, the online journal RSC Advances, reviewed by the Royal Sciences Association of China, announced that 68 articles published were found to be fake articles. According to the RSC Advanced survey, this fake paper looks like a legitimate paper when viewed alone, but when compared with fake papers, the structure or template is similar, so it is thought that it was clearly mass produced.

In addition, Nature’s ancestors recently revealed that mass-produced fake papers have spread to academic journals, and there are more than 370 mass-produced fake papers and more than 1,000 suspicious papers that various journals withdrew after January 2020.

The largest source of such fake papers is China. It is known that there is a black market for fake papers in China.In 2010, scandals were reported that Wuhan University’s business research scholar wrote a paper related to fictitious research as a ghost writer, and in 2013, the results of an investigation into the fake paper black market were published in Science. In addition, in 2017, according to reports that 107 papers were fake, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China directly announced the reinforcement of the crackdown on fake papers.

All 370 fake papers withdrawn since January 2020 were also authors of Chinese doctors. Chinese doctors often impose that a paper is published in academic journals as a condition of promotion, and in order to be promoted to chief executive officer in Beijing, in August 2020, the condition that he/she is the leading author is limited to those who have published more than two papers in journals. I have decided. Doctors working in China are more likely to purchase fake papers because they cannot devote time to research due to their busy daily work. In fact, the number of papers published by Chinese doctors has increased 50 times over the past 20 years.

In February 2020, the Ministry of Science and Education notified research institutes, including hospitals, not to judge researchers only by the number of papers published, and instructing them to cancel the practice of giving bonuses for each paper publication. There are views that are expected to be effective in this movement, but experts who actually deal with fake papers say that fake papers have not decreased.

The mass-produced fake papers discovered so far use a commercial email address rather than an email address issued by an academic institution, and the original data does not exist. Features are being identified. However, when it comes to fakes, it is believed that they exist in large quantities because they are extracted from fake papers that have already been caught, and it is unclear whether they have similarities between fake papers that are not detected by fakes. For a known fake paper, experts say it is the tip of the iceberg.

Although they have begun to devise academic guidance measures for this fake dissertation problem, since they are independent from each other, there are problems such as a problem of limited linkage and possible violation of data protection rules that share personal information of the authors of the dissertation in question. On the other hand, experts are expressing strong concern because it is confirmed that fake thesis technology is always being done. Related information can be found here.