There’s been an epidemic of fraudulent scientific papers published in all the sciences. There’s too much pressure to publish, and too few guardrails. Aside from this, many fake papers are produced as tests by members of a single society— the Retraction Society. When the society first started, members had a contest to see who could find the most fraudulent papers, and extra points where given for finding published papers in more than one discipline. Privately, at first, one scientist bet a colleague that he could produce a paper and have it published in a respected journal that was totally fraudulent but was also totally undetectable. Whether he was right or not, it became a challenge for members of the society to see how many papers they could publish that described findings that couldn’t be reproduced. These are always published under false names. One scientist produces more than twenty-five fakes per year. After publication, the writers use their real names to expose their own papers.
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