More Fakery

According to President Putin’s May decrees of 2012, the share of publications by Russian scholars among the total number of publications in scientific journals index in Web of Science should reach 2.44% by 2015, and at least five Russian universities should be ranked in the top 100 world’s leading universities by 20202. These legal acts shaped the academic landscape for the subsequent decade. First, the 5-100 project, also known as the Russian Academic Excellence Project, selected 21 Russian universities to enter international top rankings, which also meant increasing their publication performance. Second, in response to the new legislative framework, universities introduced new publication criteria for effective contracts, promotion or financial benefits.

And this produced exactly the response that anyone who has observed human behavior could have predicted. To pick an example from my own industry (and from my own personal experience), any industrial med-chem department that has been so foolish as to set "number of compounds submitted" as an explicit target for raises and promotions has paid the price for that idea as well. Not so much with faked compounds, of course, but with a deluge of low-quality junk that was easy to crank out to meet the targets. 

In the case of these faked authorships, some of these papers have indeed been junk, sent to predatory publishers. But as you can see from the above, the Russian authorities and others have wised up to the point that they want to see papers in real journals with real reputations. Indeed, the new paper finds that such papers have shown up in all the major academic publishers - Elsevier, Springer/Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, T&F, OUP, and more. These folks have all been alerted to the latest list, and one would very much want to see some action taken. There have in fact been increased numbers of mass retractions in recent years, and there clearly need to be even more.

But a look at Elisabeth Bik's Twitter feed shows you how hard it is to get this to happen. These aren't so much fake-authorship problems, but good old data fakery. Over and over you will see examples of clear image manipulation and duplication, but when journal editors are alerted they (all too often) just let authors submit a new figure and walk away as if nothing had happened. "Oops! We didn't send the right chart/Western blot/micrograph! Here's the one we meant to send, so everything's fine". Everything is not fine. The originals in these cases are clearly manipulated, and there should be consequences for that. Try this case out, for example, with a graphic from the original paper reproduced at right. Now that, folks, is some bullshit, cut-and-paste garbage that anyone should be ashamed to have been associated with. But a new graphic was supplied, all's fine, and a publication ethics watchdog says they have no problems with the way the journal handled it. But they should.

The scientific literature is always going to have rough edges - things don't work out, hypotheses get discarded, weird variables make things hard to reproduce, and people just make mistakes. And that's when everyone is being honest! But if we're going to keep filling things up with various combinations of fake journals, fake papers, fake author lists, and faked data then we're going to regret dumping all this steaming garbage into what is supposed to be a common pool of knowledge. However many retractions occur in 2022, I can tell you for sure that there should be a lot more.