| Paper mills, which are companies that sell fake papers to academics desperate for publications, have industrialized scientific fraud. A new study shows paper mills now double their output every 1.5 years. Real research, by contrast, only doubles every 15 years. If you follow the math, fake science eventually outnumbers real science. This is a huge problem because scientific literature is upstream of everything: drug discovery, clinical guidelines, and increasingly, AI training data. If fake papers keep scaling, we’re polluting downstream systems, including scientific AI. Peer review was designed for a world where misconduct was rare and individual. It has no defenses against industrialized fraud. Scientific publishing is collapsing. So what comes next? |
Paper published in bad journals are simply ignored by serious researchers, including drug discovery and clinical guidelines.
I'm not sure about AI training, but if they don't they will have soon a nasty surprise and will have to reinvent impact factor, h-index and a few additional stupid metrics that everyone use to try to ignore all the crap that is published in bad journals (and no so bad journals).