- Posted August 5, 2025
Organized Scientific Fraud Is Growing at Alarming Rate
The rise of “fake” science poses a serious threat to the integrity of academic research, a new study warns.
A widespread underground network of fraudsters is pumping out fake scientific results at an ever-increasing pace, researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In fact, the publication of fraudulent science now outpaces the growth rate of legitimate scientific journals, researchers found.
“These networks are essentially criminal organizations, acting together to fake the process of science,” said senior researcher Luís A.N. Amaral, a professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern University. “Millions of dollars are involved in these processes.”
News reports of scientific fraud usually involve single instances of retracted papers, falsified data or plagiarism committed by individuals who take shortcuts to get ahead, researchers said.
But this new investigation revealed a shadowy network churning out fake science outside the public’s awareness.
“This study is probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with in my entire life,” Amaral said in a news release.
“Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It’s distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others,” he continued. “But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it.”
Researchers analyzed retracted papers and tracked studies published in de-indexed journals — scholarly journals that have been removed from major online scientific repositories for failing to meet quality or ethical standards.
The data revealed coordinated networks of “paper mills” that churn out low-quality manuscripts that are then sold to academics who want to quickly publish new work.
These ready-made reports feature fabricated data, manipulated or stolen images, and plagiarized content – as well as claims that can be nonsensical or physically impossible.
“More and more scientists are being caught up in paper mills,” Amaral said. “Not only can they buy papers, but they can buy citations. Then, they can appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all.”
The paper mills “sell basically anything that can be used to launder a reputation,” lead researcher Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern, said in a news release.
“They often sell authorship slots for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A person might pay more money for the first author position or less money for a fourth author position,” Richardson said.
“People also can pay to get papers they have written automatically accepted in a journal through a sham peer-review process.”
The research team also found that fraud networks use several strategies to get work published:
Groups of researchers collude to publish papers across multiple journals, retracting their work only when their activities are discovered.
Brokers serve as intermediaries to coordinate this mass publication of fake papers.
Perpetrators focus on specific, limited fields of research that are less likely to detect and head off fake reports.
“Brokers connect all the different people behind the scenes,” Amaral said. “You need to find someone to write the paper. You need to find people willing to pay to be the authors. You need to find a journal where you can get it all published. And you need editors in that journal who will accept that paper.”
These groups also will do an end-run around respected journals by “hijacking” journals that have gone out of print, researchers said.
Fraudsters can take over the name or website of a defunct journal, surreptitiously assume its identity, and start churning out fraudulent science that appears to be coming from a legit source, researchers said.
“This happened to the journal HIV Nursing,” Richardson said. “It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the U.K., then it stopped publishing, and its online domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain name and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing.”
The advent of AI threatens to make the spread of fake science even worse, researchers added.
“If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature,” Richardson said. “We have no clue what’s going to end up in the literature, what’s going to be regarded as scientific fact and what’s going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers.”
Academia needs to respond to this threat by enhancing scrutiny of editorial processes, improving the detection of fabricated research, investigating these fraud networks, and radically restructuring the system of incentives in science, the researchers said.
“Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity,” Amaral said.
“If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized,” he continued. “At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned.”
Amaral said some people worry that talking about this issue is attacking science, but he’s not among them.
“I strongly believe we are defending science from bad actors,” he concluded. “We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it.”
More information
The American Council on Science and Health has more on the lasting impacts of scientific fraud.
SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release, Aug. 4, 2025
