A university and a publisher are teaming up to combat paper mills in a unique way: By enlisting a Ph.D. candidate.
In April, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands announced it would be collaborating with Wiley to establish a four-year research position focused on paper mills.
“Of course one Ph.D. will not fix the problem,” said Cyril Labbé of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, whose lab hosted a Ph.D. student in 2014 to detect computer-generated manuscripts. “But going this way is far more constructive than resorting to empty rhetoric and wooden language, as some publishers tend to do.”
The selected candidate will go beyond “diagnosing symptoms” of a paper mill, said Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a senior researcher at CWTS and deputy director of the program, and will focus on gaining a more complete conceptual understanding of paper mills. Kaltenbrunner expects this will lead to recommendations for actors in the system, publishers, and policymakers.
“There will certainly be some kind of practical relevance of the research,” he said.
The researcher will focus on how paper mills operate, including the services they offer. These companies produce fake research papers, offer authorship of already-accepted manuscripts, manipulate the peer review process, or some combination.
The candidate will also look into how these business models are enabled by the research culture of different countries, including academic community dynamics. “It’s very much about the embedding of paper mills into different research cultures, which, in turn, has institutional components and community dynamics,” Kaltenbrunner told us.
Mike Streeter, Wiley’s Director of Research Integrity Strategy & Policy, told us Wiley will not be involved in selecting the candidate, supervising the student, or determining the outcome of the project. However, they worked with Kaltenbrunner and other supervising CWTS researchers to “set up the necessary parameters of the project and focus the project.”
Since acquiring Hindawi in 2021, Wiley has shuttered some of its journals and retracted thousands of papers for paper mill activity. Last year, up to one in seven submissions for hundreds of Wiley journals were flagged by the company’s Papermill Detection tool.
Streeter told us the project was “not explicitly” inspired by issues with Hindawi, but part of their larger effort to roll out new screening tools.
The research position in Labbe’s lab was inspired by a 2014 episode in which 16 fake conference proceedings were discovered in Springer Nature publications. The publisher then funded a Ph.D, student, Tien Nguyen, who looked into detecting SCIgen, a program that generates computer science papers.
Labbé told us the program in his lab differed from CWTS’ in that the solution of automatic detection of SCIgen was “quite clear” even before research started. Nguyen helped to create an open-source software program, SciDetect.
At this stage, the paper mill program coordinators — who, besides Kaltenbrunner, includes Stephen Pinfield at the University of Sheffield and Ludo Waltman, also of Leiden — aren’t sure what methods the researcher will use, and what the expected outputs of the project would be. They are looking for someone with a background in quantitative analysis of publication data and qualitative methods regarding research culture.
Kaltenbrunner emphasized that, at the end of the program, the researcher wouldn’t be releasing a list of “offenders,” whether that be paper mills themselves or individuals involved. “We feel it wouldn’t be particularly effective, since the landscape of paper mills is, of course, constantly in flux,” he said.
The program will have access to confidential publication and submission data behind the scenes at Wiley, Streeter said, but won’t exclusively focus on Wiley publications. The candidate will likely use tools like the Retraction Watch Database and the Problematic Paper Screener as data tools for publications outside of Wiley, he said.
Kaltenbrunner said the publisher’s involvement “raises the possibility that we also touch on issues that will be uncomfortable for Wiley.” Although he said Wiley has the opportunity to comment on drafts coming out of this project, the publisher doesn’t have veto rights, so can’t prevent things from being published that may put them in an unflattering light, Kaltenbrunner said.
Because the program won’t call out particular paper mills or individuals, Kaltenbrunner said he doesn’t expect the Ph.D. candidate to run into any particular legal or safety issues. But in the case the candidate runs into any particularly bad apples, he said the university is prepared to offer them protection.
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