In 2023, more than 10,000 scientific papers were retracted after publication.
Thus, it happens every year that the authors of some scientific papers are accused of fraud, after which the publishing scientific journal retracts such papers. It excludes them from its publication, but in 2023 the number of scientific papers excluded in this way was a record, and in one year more than ten thousand scientific papers were retracted from scientific journals due to the fraud of the authors. Fraud in a scientific paper can be done in several ways. For example, scientific research data can be falsified, the peer review process can be cheated, scientific data or the text of the paper may be stolen from somewhere, etc.
Non-profit groups for evaluating the quality of scientific papers:
Nowadays, a new tradition has emerged among scientists that before publishing their papers, they issue a press release in which their research is greatly exaggerated. Such announcements on news media and especially on social media are presented with more pepper and spice as if this research is going to revolutionize the world. But later this paper was proved to be a fraud, then the retraction of this paper was not even mentioned in the media.
To solve this problem, serious scientists have come together to form non-profit groups that expose fraudulent research. Artificial Intelligence is also being used for this task – given in Artificial Intelligence Papers. It can find patterns in data that shouldn’t exist in the data, or identify plagiarism in the text of a paper. For example, in one paper, scientists suspected that the data used in it was fake, meaning it was not collected from scientific experiments. These scientists requested the team writing the paper to publish the full data.
When the authors of the paper provided the complete data in the form of an Excel sheet, the artificial intelligence identified that the data had been stolen from pre-existing databases published in several different places. And then the amount of data was increased by copying and pasting the data again and again – for this reason, the journal excluded the paper from its publication. Similarly, artificial intelligence caught plagiarized text in several papers and identified the original source – all such papers were retracted by the journal.
Retraction Watch Blog:
One such non-profit group is the Center for Scientific Integrity, which maintains a blog called Retraction Watch. This blog details retracted papers in various scientific fields and publishes the names of scientists whose papers have been retracted. The purpose of this blog is to let scientists know about all retracted papers and not to use fraudulent papers as references. Scientists whose papers are retracted rarely announce the retraction, so other scientists do not know that the data in the paper they are referencing is unreliable. Especially in the days of COVID-19, many fake papers were published regarding the COVID virus, which was exposed by scientists of the Center for Scientific Integrity and forced to withdraw these papers.
The increasing rate of fraud in scientific papers:
It’s not that most papers published in scientific journals are fraudulent—the retraction rate for scientific papers published as of 2022 was 0.2 percent. But this rate is three times higher than the retraction rate of just ten years ago—is it because fraud in the publication of scientific papers has increased? Yes, it is possible – publication of scientific papers is very important for scientists. In many universities and research organizations, the number of published papers is very important in the criteria for the advancement of scientists – modern technology has made it easier to plagiarize material from other sources and to generate fake data. But at the same time, it is also true that with artificial intelligence and the presence of every paper on the Internet, it has become easier to catch such fraud.
Top countries in scientific fraud:
In the last two decades, among the countries whose scientists’ papers have been retracted the most, Saudi Arabia is at top, while Pakistan is at second place. The third place secured by Russia and on the fourth place is China. Followed by Egypt, Malaysia, Iran, and India respectively. The main cause of fraud in the publication of scientific papers in these countries is fake scientific journals. These journals take money from scientists and publish their papers without any peer review or quality control.
The rate of retraction of scientific papers in 2023 has been higher than previous years and more than ten thousand papers have been retracted so far. Yet some experts believe that very few fraudulent scientific papers are caught. so the number of fraudulent papers is not just in the tens of thousands, but many times that number.
Note: The information for this article has been taken from the renowned scientific journal “Nature”.
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