Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale, and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.
It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating—possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images, and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.
Even when bogus papers are spotted—usually by amateur sleuths on their own time—academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews, and other research and discusses findings.