Paper mills increase their production. Their articles flooded the publishing world.
Neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel developed a detector to identify such articles. After screening 5,000 articles, it showed that up to 34% of neuroscience articles published in 2020 were probably made up or plagiarized (in medicine, this figure was 24%). The problem so far is that the Sabel tool correctly marked almost 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in the test sample, but it also marked up to 44% of genuine documents as fake. Therefore, the results need to be confirmed by qualified reviewers.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), representing 120 publishers, is leading the project to develop new tools - Integrity Hub. One of the reliable signs of fake research results and fake articles is referencing a significant number of retracted papers. The tool also pays attention to manuscripts and reviews sent via email from internet addresses crafted to look like those of legitimate institutions.

Twenty publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, help develop the Integrity Hub. TM also expects to pilot a separate tool this year that detects manuscripts simultaneously sent to more than one journal, a practice considered unethical and a sign they may have come from paper mills.

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