Paper mills: the ‘cartel-like’ companies behind fraudulent scientific journals
2023 research highlights a dramatic increase in fraudulent scientific artiles traced back to paper mills. In just five years, the numbers of retractions soared jumped from 10 in 2019 to 2,099 in 2023.
Paper mills have also extremely overwhelmed major scientific journal publishers. Hindawi and Wiley, publishers of open access journals in the UK, for example, retracted around 1,200 paper mill articles in 2023. SAGE, a global publisher of books, journals and academic library resources and Elsevier, a scholarly publisher in the Netherlands also retracted hundreds of paper mill articles in 2022.
Paper mills are found operating in countries whose research policies incentivise researchers to produce as many scientific articles as possible, such as China, Russia, India and Iran.
