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How big is science’s fake-paper problem?

Nature: “The scientific literature is polluted with fake manuscripts churned out by paper mills — businesses that sell bogus work and authorships to researchers who need journal publications for their CVs. But just how large is this paper-mill problem? An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. Around 70,000 of these were published last year alone (see ‘The paper-mill problem’). The analysis estimates that 1.5–2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%…”

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