For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern.
A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.
“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries.
“Science relies on trusting what others did, so you do not have to repeat everything,” Dr. Amaral said.
By the 2010s, journal editors and watchdog organizations were warning that this trust was under threat. They flagged a growing number of papers with fabricated data and doctored images. In the years that followed, the factors driving this increase grew more intense.
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The post Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds appeared first on New York Times.
