By Dr Joanne Murray, University of Edinburgh, UK
Paper mills are businesses that accept commissions to produce a written piece of work for an individual. Some are simply trading documents prepared originally for legitimate purposes but then ‘recycled’.
Increasingly though these businesses are more sophisticated and will produce a novel piece of writing that meets the specific requirements of the individual commissioning the document. For example, this might be an essay on a given topic that will not draw attention when submitted to a plagiarism detection tool and should earn the student a specified grade.
Those of us involved in teaching at university level have been concerned about students using paper mills to complete coursework for several years, knowing that proving a student has done so is difficult to demonstrate unless the student makes an exceptionally careless mistake.
I have been involved in investigating academic misconduct by students for nearly 20 years and have only been successful in proving that a student had used a paper mill on two occasions: once due to an exceptionally careless mistake and, the second time, to the student’s honest reply when I asked if they had written the essay in question.
I am confident that these two students were not the exceptions and that the use of paper mills by university students is far more common than academics would want to admit.
The UK government has recently promised to outlaw paper mills and the bill, by which this promise is to be fulfilled, is currently progressing before the House of Commons (Bill 176 2021-22).
How effective a deterrent the penalty, a fine of an undefined sum, will be at stopping this very lucrative global business is not yet clear: especially, since the burden of proof would have to be the same as that required when a university investigates and finds guilty a student.
I would like to think that my success rate in proving the use of a paper mill is typical rather than exceptionally poor and I therefore fear that this promised deterrent will be a toothless tiger.
Science detectives exposing ethics breaches
It has become increasingly apparent that the use of paper mills has extended from students to the wider research science community.
A small minority within our community are undermining our collective good research integrity.
Some researchers from around the world appear to be using paper mills to produce manuscripts for submission to scientific journals at an alarming rate (https://publicationethics.org/resources/forum-discussions/publishing-manipulation-paper-mills).
Jana Christopher recently described how the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) suite of publications had identified, since 2018, a significant increase in submissions that were suspicious (1).
By suspicious, I mean that Christopher was able to demonstrate examples of data fabrication as well as other examples of bad practice.
A hallmark of many of the submissions identified as being generated in a paper mill is the inclusion of images that are fabricated; for example, Western blots that have the same control bands used for three separate experiments but each set of bands has been manipulated so they are not immediately apparent to be the same.
If you are not already familiar with her amazing detective work, then I recommend reading Elisabeth Bik’s blogs and her publication on the extent of image fabrication that she and colleagues have detected (2). I suspect that you will despair at the extent of bad practice that she and colleagues are revealing.
Research integrity at Experimental Physiology
Since joining the Editorial Board of Experimental Physiology (EP), I have identified several submissions with suspicious images. (None of these submissions were accepted for publication in EP.)
EP follows the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices so when confronted with causes for concern, such as suspicious images, the EP office will write to the authors asking for clarification including a request to see the original data.
Most of these authors either never respond within the timeframe given, and thus have their manuscripts rejected on ethical grounds, or actively choose to withdraw their manuscripts as they cannot meet journal requirements.
While it is hoped that EP’s concerns are noted by the authors of these papers, there currently exist no mechanisms by which to prevent these manuscripts then being submitted to other journals, so they may still be accepted for publication thereby entering the public record.
We need to consider as a community how to stop those scientists using these paper mills. Unlike most university course work, there are more ways of demonstrating the infidelity of a submitted manuscript therefore it should be possible to clearly demonstrate misconduct.
Should we consider sanctions for scientists who deliberately try to deceive us by fabricating images? If we introduce such sanctions, then we do need to consider how to protect those who have made an honest and/or careless mistake that can be explained and corrected. Rather than using deterrents, some have argued that education is the solution to this crisis we are facing (3).
I would like to believe that all universities actively aim to inculcate good academic and research integrity in all their students, which suggests that education alone is not working. Whilst landing a first job, keeping one’s job, and progressing up the career ladder are all inextricably linked to the number of publications an individual has, there will be individuals who will be tempted to use paper mills if there is no incentive not to.
We need to agree what these incentives not to use paper mills are sooner than later, to ensure that all paper mills are shut down before they do irreparable damage to both our trust in all our fellow scientists and to the trust that the public has in scientists and science.
References
- Christopher J. (2021). The raw truth about paper mills. FEBS Letters, 595, 1751-1757.
- Bik EM, Casadevall A, Fang FC (2016). The prevalence of inappropriate image duplication in biomedical publications. mBio, 7, e00809-16.
- Tang L. (2019). Five ways China must cultivate research integrity. Nature, 575, 589-591.