It was the muteness of the authors that led the Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (BJMBR) to realize that it had been a victim of a paper factory.
Contact is customary when a problem is pointed out in scientific articles, and the correction is of interest to the authors. The silence confirmed what the editor-in-chief of the publication, Eduardo Magalhães Rego, already suspected.
Signing articles written by others is nothing new in academia, but the multiplication of problems in the last two years seems to indicate a “professionalization” of the scheme — hence the name “papers mills”.
The problem is not limited to Brazil. Articles with various scams invaded scientific journals around the world and are starting to be portrayed now, generating a jump in numbers.
In 2021, until the middle of this month, there were 606, more than triple that of 2020. The numbers are from Retraction Watch, a database that catalogs all corrections of studies made in the main scientific journals in the world.
Editors suspect the bespoke factories are run by graduate students looking for jobs, underpaid scientists and even multi-member organizations.
The factories also submit the article to journal editors and work to have it approved in the peer-reviewed evaluation by other researchers.
“Withdrawal is not good for any journal, but it is important for scientific information”, says Rego, who is also a professor at the USP School of Medicine and coordinator of the Acute Leukemia Service at the São Paulo Cancer Institute.
Published in Brazil about 30 years ago, the BJMBR is among the highest quality periodicals in the areas of biological sciences, physical education and nursing, according to the most recent assessment carried out by Capes, linked to the Ministry of Education.
Since the episodes that led to the retractions, in 2020 and 2021, the publication started to adopt, as an additional requirement for study submission, a form that tries to guarantee the identification of authorship of the studies.
In Brazil, it is not difficult to find advertisements for production services for scientific articles made to order on the internet, but the professor considers the problem more related to graduation or courses that require academic work to obtain the title.
Solange Santos, production and publication coordinator at SciELO, the main Brazilian repository of papers, believes that the impact of factories in the country is low, although difficult to measure. In the case of the magazine, the articles had been published since 2017 and were portrayed only that year.
Worldwide, retraction processes take an average of three years. According to Santos, the delay occurs because the process involves a complaint by third parties and an investigation by the magazine. “But a 12-year delay, as in the case of the study that linked autism and vaccination, is unacceptable today”, he says. She refers to the wrong work published in the Lancet in 1998 and used to this day as an argument for the anti-vaccination movement.
Since 1998, SciELO has registered only 40 retractions, a very low number compared to the more than 22 thousand works published this year alone. None expressly mentions the role of paper factories. It looks like a good picture, but it probably isn’t.
In the coordinator’s assessment, the number must be below reality, due to the cultural constraint that associates retractions with bad scientific practices, and not transparency, which is the guarantee of the publication’s quality. “It is important to remove this stigma because it discourages retractions”, he says.
Editors use the magazine space to make scathing complaints about the problem. Roland Seifert, a professor at the Institute of Pharmacology at the Hannover Medical School, published an editorial in September in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology, in which he called the factories “criminal gangs of scientific publishing.”
Seifert says the factories are a problem in China’s academic structure. The services of the paper factories are mainly offered to professionals with little time to dedicate to research, but who receive promotions and bonuses for scientific production.
Until 2020, Chinese doctors were required to publish at least two studies a year, favoring the popularization of this type of service, says Seifert. In 2020, the Chinese government revoked the measure, among other decisions taken to try to mitigate the problem of fraud.
Folha tried to contact the Chinese Embassy in Brazil by e-mail for more information about the results, but did not receive a response until the end of this edition.
Seifert argues that the sophistication of fraud and massive performance force the improvement of the traditional peer review practice.
This is because, in general, the most common system for evaluating studies for publication is based on mutual trust —believing that the authors did not commission the work, for example.
Journals must intensify vigilance in the pre-publication stages, demanding documents and terms of reliability from authors, says Seifert. In addition, the payment and professionalization of reviewers can help ensure the improvement of the service.
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