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   From: bksherman@bleeding-rectums.cnn.com   
      
   When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research   
   papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of   
   the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their   
   charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the   
   executive editor at the journal. “I was determined to try to get   
   to the bottom of what was going on.”   
      
   A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from   
   the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry   
   (RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are   
   still under investigation. Fisher had found what seemed to be   
   the products of paper mills: companies that churn out fake   
   scientific manuscripts to order. All the papers came from   
   authors at Chinese hospitals. The journals’ publisher, the RSC   
   in London, announced in a statement that it had been the victim   
   of what it believed to be “the systemic production of falsified   
   research”.   
      
   What was surprising about this was not the paper-mill activity   
   itself: research-integrity sleuths have repeatedly warned that   
   some scientists buy papers from third-party firms to help their   
   careers. Rather, it was extraordinary that a publisher had   
   publicly announced something that journals generally keep quiet   
   about. “We believe that it is a paper mill, so we want to be   
   open and transparent,” Fisher says.   
      
   The RSC wasn’t alone, its statement added: “We are one of a   
   number of publishers to have been affected by such activity.”   
   Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers   
   that have been publicly linked to paper mills, an analysis by   
   Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected to   
   follow.   
      
   Much of this literature cleaning has come about because, last   
   year, outside sleuths publicly flagged papers that they think   
   came from paper mills owing to their suspiciously similar   
   features. Collectively, the lists of flagged papers total more   
   than 1,000 studies, the analysis shows. Editors are so concerned   
   by the issue that last September, the Committee on Publication   
   Ethics (COPE), a publisher-advisory body in London, held a forum   
   dedicated to discussing “systematic manipulation of the   
   publishing process via paper mills”. Their guest speaker was   
   Elisabeth Bik, a research-integrity analyst in California known   
   for her skill in spotting duplicated images in papers, and one   
   of the sleuths who posts their concerns about paper mills online.   
      
   Bik thinks there are thousands more of these papers in the   
   literature. The RSC’s announcement is significant for its   
   openness, she says. “It is pretty embarrassing that so many   
   papers are fake. Kudos to them to admit that they have been   
   fooled.”   
      
   At some journals that have had a spate of apparent paper-mill   
   submissions, editors have now revamped their review processes,   
   aiming not to be fooled again. Combating industrialized cheating   
   requires stricter review: telling editors to ask for raw data,   
   for instance, and hiring people specifically to check images.   
   Science publishing needs a “concerted, coordinated effort to   
   stamp out falsified research”, the RSC said.   
      
   Paper-mill detectives   
   In January 2020, Bik and other image detectives who work under   
   pseudonyms — Smut Clyde, Morty and Tiger BB8 — posted, on a blog   
   run by science journalist Leonid Schneider, a list of more than   
   400 published papers they said probably came from a paper mill.   
   Bik dubbed it the ‘tadpole’ paper mill, because of the shapes   
   that appeared in the papers’ western blot analyses, a type of   
   test used to detect proteins in biological samples. A spate of   
   media headlines followed. Throughout the year, the sleuths (not   
   always working together) posted spreadsheets of other suspect   
   papers — picking up on similar features across multiple studies.   
   By March 2021, they had collectively listed more than 1,300   
   articles, by Nature’s tally, as possibly coming from paper mills.   
      
   Journals started to look at the papers. According to Nature’s   
   analysis, around 26% of the articles that the sleuths alleged   
   came from paper mills have so far been retracted or labelled   
   with expressions of concern. Many others are still under   
   investigation. The Journal of Cellular Biochemistry (JCB), for   
      
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