Scholarly publishing in mathematics is unlike many other fields, marked by fewer papers, fewer coauthors per paper and fewer citations. But that doesn’t mean the field is immune to fraud and cheating.
A pair of papers posted to the arXiv addresses the issue of fraudulent publishing in math, particularly metrics gaming, and offers a list of recommendations to help detect and deal with that problem and other fraudulent activities. (The former was also published in the October AMS Notices; the latter will appear in the November issue.) “Fraudulent publishing undermines trust in science and scientific results and therefore fuels antiscience movements,” mathematician Ilka Agricola, lead author of both papers, told Retraction Watch.
A professor of mathematics at Marburg University in Germany, Agricola was president of the German Mathematical Society in 2021-2022 and is chair of the Committee on Publishing of the International Mathematical Union. The new articles are the products of a working group of the IMU and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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