There is a whole cast of bad actors, both academics and non-academics, involved in running paper mills. Finding the real guilty parties and proving that they are guilty is extremely difficult. A history of a retraction is a very crude marker of distrust or paper mill activity.
Here’s my view on the characters behind paper mills, how they are and are not detected, and the role of retraction notices.
The real bad actors
These people are the brains behind paper mills. They organize logistics and operations and think up new ways to circumvent journal quality control processes. They reap financial rewards for ensuring manuscripts get through to publication while selling authorship and citations along the way. They are engaging in criminal activity that amounts to fraud, but they are safely beyond detection by any investigation by a journal or publisher. This is because they can only be detected if they are also authors, editors or reviewers. Their activities are criminal and require criminal investigation by a suitably empowered body. Journals and publishers do not have any authority to look for the evidence that would prove that authorship was sold, or payment was received for citations. They cannot scrutinise bank statements or private communications.
Included in this group of bad actors are corrupt academics who are senior enough to act as editors and peer reviewers, especially for special issues. They might be suspected if they can be linked to paper mill manuscripts. While it may be obvious to the investigators, it is not, in my experience, possible to prove via substantive evidence that they were knowingly involved in a paper mill. If confronted, they plead ignorance, blame co-editors, obfuscate, retaliate via legal threats and stonewall.
If reported to their institutions, there is little the institution can do. They are not empowered to collect evidence of fraud either. They cannot scrutinise an academic’s behaviour in the role of an editor. Their investigation becomes a matter if weighing up the word of the accused academic against the word of the journal or publisher.
The customers
The customers of paper mills are junior researchers who need publications because the research culture rewards publications. Some junior researchers may be driven to buy authorship out of desperation. In an environment where all their peers are taking part in paper mills, to not do so as well puts them at a competitive disadvantage and their careers in jeopardy. They are as much the victims of a research culture that rewards publications as they are bad actors.
Innocent authors
Innocent authors get caught up in paper mill activity too. For example, when they submit their legitimate research to a special issue which is managed by corrupt editors. Retractions may include research by innocent authors who chose to retract their work because of honest errors as well.
Retractions not due to paper mills
Of course, retractions are published for non-paper mill related intentional and unintentional misconduct too. The only way to distinguish between these and paper mill related retractions is via the wording of the retraction notices. However, the wording might not explicitly say that the retraction is related to a paper mill.
Retractions are not reliable indicators of guilt
The evidence that journals and publishers collect when investigating paper mills is focused entirely on manuscripts and articles. They make a judgement on whether the evidence they find is enough to undermine trust in the reported research, not on whether the authors are guilty or innocent of anything. If their trust in the published research is undermined, a retraction notice is published.
So, retractions are published for a variety of reasons on research that is authored by a heterogeneous group of researchers including the innocent, naively guilty and knowingly guilty. A retracted article may have been authored by all three types of character and all three types will have the retraction on their publication record.
In most cases it will be a combination of junior researchers (the customers) and innocent researchers, not the real bad actors, who get called out for involvement in paper mill activity.
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This post and image were created without the use of GAI tools.