SIRC Investigator Series, April 2025
Presenter: Bill Woodall, Ph.D.
All
areas of science are being affected, from mathematics to medicine. These are
some of the primary concerns: authorships being sold, fake papers produced by
paper mills, sham reviews, unethical behavior of guest editors for special
issues, bribes offered to editors, the rise of predatory journals and
conferences, citation cartels, plagiarism, and the fabrication of data and
images.
These
and other issues, illustrated with numerous examples, will be discussed in this
presentation. A related issue is the proliferation of junk science.
Efforts
to protect the scientific literature will be discussed, such as the
contributions by individual sleuths and the use of the STM Integrity Hub that
was established by the major academic publishers. There will also be some
discussion of the article retraction process and the effect of AI on
publishing. Over 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023, a record
number.