Bogus scientific papers

Starting in the 2000s, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

Even when the bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews other research and discusses findings.  Fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up; this slows down research progress.

The impact on publishers is profound. Important scientific indexes – databases of academic publications that many researchers rely on to do their work – may delist journals that publish too many compromised papers. 

As of 2025, it is estimated that about 119,000 scholarly journal articles and conference papers are published globally every week, or more than 6 million a year. Publishers estimate that, at most journals, about 2% of the papers submitted – but not necessarily published – are likely fake, although this number can be much higher at some publications.

Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before they are published by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. This peer review process is designed to stop flawed research from being disseminated, but is far from perfect. Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don’t look for signs of fraud. And some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees. There is growing criticism that legitimate publishers could do more to track and blacklist journals and authors who regularly publish fake papers that are sometimes little more than artificial intelligence-generated phrases strung together. 

It is difficult to know exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. 

This practice is particularly pronounced in emerging economies where resources to do bona fide science are limited – and where governments, eager to compete on a global scale, push particularly strong “publish or perish” incentives.  As a result, there is an online underground economy for all things scholarly publishing: authorship, citations, even academic journal editors. Analysts’ data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard hit, while areas like philosophy and art are less affected.

In 2014 leading publishers withdrew more than 120 nonsensical publications automatically generated with the SCIgen program -- a software designed by three MIT PhD students in 2005 to “maximize amusement rather than coherence”. Casual observations suggested that similar problematic papers are still published and sold, without follow-up retractions.