A sudden surge of supposedly irrefutable research findings has the world of academia reeling over suspicions that "paper mills" are proliferating in China and churning out reams of unsubstantiated data.

This begs the question, why? The answer apparently lies in the prospect of an individual winning promotion on the basis of the number of research papers under his or her name published in respected journals around the world.

MANY AUTHORS HOSPITAL DOCTORS

Elisabeth Bik, who studied microorganisms at Stanford University and now works as a science consultant, headed a team that in late February released an online list of more than 400 research papers with "suspicious” content.

Most of the authors were doctors at municipal or university hospitals in China, and some of the papers were published in reputable academic journals.

The team turned up numerous similarities among the papers.

Images related to electrophoresis, which is used to analyze genes in biological research, offer a case in point.

In some papers, part of the background of the images was precisely the same after the contrast was adjusted, even though they were supposed to have been obtained through separate experiments.

The same background appeared in papers "written" by different authors totally unrelated to each other.

The team also discovered suspicious points in the results of experiments that were conducted using other methods.

“(The papers) all appear to have been generated by the same source,” said Bik.

The team started monitoring the publication of research papers from China in January.

Bik said her team went online using the same key words that cropped up in multiple “suspicious” papers and checked the contents of each one with the team's anonymous collaborators.

The Asahi Shimbun emailed a request to interview 10 corresponding authors of the papers on the list, but none of them had replied as of the evening of April 7.

PURCHASING PAPERS TO SEEK PROMOTION?

Back to why science papers are being mass-produced. The U.S. scientific journal Science ran an article in 2013 that took note of a thriving “black market” where scientists buy written papers.

According to the article, doctors at Chinese hospitals are more likely to win promotion if they can demonstrate a track record of having their research findings published in renowned journals. Many apparently do not have the time to carry out research and simply purchase papers on the black market instead, the article said.

Between 2018 and 2019, researchers and editors in Australia reported that paper mills in China are mass-producing research papers.

The researchers in January also provided detailed characteristics of papers produced by the mills in a professional journal of molecular biology.

PAPERS CAN BE SUBMITTED WITHOUT DATA

Japanese researchers also expressed deep concern about the situation.

Among them is Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, a professor of neuroscience at Fujita Health University in Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, and editor in chief of Molecular Brain, an international journal of neuroscience.

In an editorial published in February, he said many papers were apparently submitted without data that showed how the results of experiments were obtained.

Of 181 papers submitted over the two years since Miyakawa became editor in chief in 2017, 41 were deemed “too perfect” with regard to results of experiments.

He asked the authors of those papers to submit data, but 21 failed to do so. Among the other 20, for which Miyakawa received data, 19 were not accepted because the data was insufficient or inconsistent with results described in the papers. Only one paper was published by the journal.

“These cheating cases take advantage of the system that doesn’t necessarily require authors to attach data when submitting research papers (based on a belief that human nature is fundamentally good),” Miyakawa said. “I think there are a huge number of such cases of cheating, including minor ones."

Miyakawa called on academic journals to insist on relevant data being provided.

"That will help enhance the reproducibility of the results of their research and trust in science,” he said.