How universities became a marketplace for academic slop
Pressure to publish papers mean universities have become awash with fake papers, scientific fraud and academic slop, writes Paul Ormerod
For universities, it seems that it never rains but it pours. The media is currently full of stories of the woes of graduates and their seemingly ever-rising, never-repaid loans.
But concerns are growing about what many may see as the core function of a university, at least the intellectually stronger ones: namely, the research which they publish.
Academics publish their work in specialist journals, which in principle only accept papers once they have been read by other academics – the so-called peer review process – and deemed to be of a sufficient standard to merit appearing in print.
There has been a massive increase over the past decade in both the number of journals which exist and in the volume of papers which are published.
Even in 2016, it is estimated that, worldwide across all disciplines, 1.9m academic articles were published each year. Now, the figure stands at over 5m and is rising.
Fake papers and academic slop
Unless your field of expertise is very narrowly defined – Hittite grammar, say – it is simply not possible to read every piece which comes out which might be relevant to your own work, and in some areas not even a fraction.
Fortunately, most of this work is of no value, so it does not matter if it is read or not. The benchmark which academics themselves use to judge the value of a paper is whether it is cited by other researchers in their own publications. In most disciplines, well over half of all the papers published have zero citations.
This is a tremendous waste of effort. It is almost like the Soviet factory meeting its Five Year Plan quota by making only right-footed shoes. Huge numbers are made, but they are not worth anything.
But academics are acting rationally as individuals in carrying out this work. They are under tremendous pressure to publish papers. Promotion, or even the continued existence of their job, depend to a substantial extent on this.
Worryingly, evidence is emerging of the system being gamed on a rapidly rising scale. Indeed what is happening is far worse than that. The number of papers which are purely faked is rising much faster than the number of genuine ones.
Universities have become a marketplace
Luis Amaral, based at Northwestern University in America, is one of the world’s top specialists in the analysis of networks. He and his team have just published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science which identifies, using advanced maths, major concerns.
Faked papers are being generated by what is known as paper mills. Citations in journals of these are being systematically manipulated. Scientific fraud extends beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.
Amaral and his colleagues identify organisations selling what they describe as “contract cheating services”, which for example pay journal editors to accept papers and anticipate defensive steps which may be taken by respectable journals to identify bogus results.
They conclude by noting the dangers posed by large scale fraudulent science given the rise in the use of large language models to encapsulate scientific knowledge. Such models cannot yet distinguish high quality science from either poor quality or fake science.
To economists, none of this will be surprising. A market has emerged. Universities have created performance metrics focused on the number of papers published and the number of times they are cited. Incentives therefore exist to game the system and people are responding to them, to the extent that Amaral argues that in some fields the scientific literature is already “irreparably damaged”.
Both universities and public grant giving bodies in research need to urgently review these metrics before the problem gets completely out of control.
Paul Ormerod is an honorary professor at the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester. You can follow him on Instagram @profpaulormerod