In previous blog entries I have cited evidence that top medical scientists have committed fraud in the areas of Alzheimer’s and cancer research. The research discussed in the passages quoted below reports a related but broader problem. In these accounts the fraud consisted mainly of doctored data and images, but did not mainly consist also of wholly fabricated text, which apparently what new evidence reveals is being increasingly cranked out by paper mills. The journals accepting these papers are presumably mainly the lower level, and less-cited, journals, and so this fraud arguably may be less damaging to the ongoing progress of science than the more sophisticated fraud carried out by top scientists and published in top journals. This argument assumes that scientists build on work published in the top journals. A problem with this argument is that many times, truly pathbreaking innovations are at first rejected by “top” journals and are only accepted by “lower” level journals. (For instance Krebs’s paper on what is now known as the “Krebs cycle” that must be memorized by all aspiring doctors, was rejected by the prestigious Nature and published by the much less prestigious Enzymologia (Lane 20??, p. 55).)
The newly revealed fraud reduces even further the credibility of those on the left who order ordinary citizens to “follow the science” rather than follow their own eyes and their own judgement.
(BTW, Dr. Elisabeth Bik who is quoted in a couple of passages quoted below, is also a prominent source in Charles Piller’s Doctored, that documented widespread high-level fraud in the Alzheimer’s research community.)
(p. D1) 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 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday [Aug. 4, 2025].
. . .
“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.
As more graduate students were trained in labs, the competition for a limited number of research jobs sharpened. High-profile papers became essential for success, not just for landing a job, but also for getting promotions and grants.
Academic publishers have responded to the demand by opening thousands of new scientific journals every year. “All of the incentives are for publishers to publish more and more,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the executive director of the Center for Scientific Integrity.
. . .
(p. D3) Elisabeth Bik, a California-based expert on scientific fraud who was not involved in the study, said that it confirmed her early suspicions. “It’s fantastic to see all the work we’ve done now solidified into a much higher-level analysis,” she said.
Dr. Amaral and his colleagues warn that fraud is growing exponentially. In their new study, they calculated that the number of suspicious new papers appearing each year was doubling every 1.5 years. That’s far faster than the increase of scientific papers overall, which is doubling every 15 years.
. . .
In an executive order in May on “gold-standard science,” President Trump drew attention to the problem of scientific fraud. “The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research,” the order stated.
. . .
Dr. Bik proposed that scientific publishers dedicate more of their profits to monitoring manuscripts for fraud, similar to how credit card companies check for suspicious purchases.
. . .
Dr. Oransky said that the way scientists are rewarded for their work would have to change as well. “To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the incentives, stupid,” he said. “We need to stop making it profitable to game the system.”
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date and year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 4, 2025, and has the title “Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds.” Where there was a minor difference in the wording between the online and print versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)
The academic paper documenting the substantial increase in scientific fraud is:
Nick Lane’s book, cited in my introductory comments, is:
Lane, Nick. Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.