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"Unfortunately, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology became a victim of paper mills. The Editor-in-Chief was alerted of the problem by science blog sites in February 2020 and responded immediately at various levels" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00210-021-02056-8
"Two recent excellent papers have summarized several major (sad) features of paper mills (Byrne and Christopher 2020; Miyakawa 2020). Various science blog sites discuss in detail the background and commercial motivations of paper mills (see, e.g., https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/24/the-full-service-paper-mill-and-its-chinese-customers/)."
"In all cases, the authors were unable to provide original data (raw data). [...]sometimes ridiculous reasons were given (the COVID-19 pandemia being the most popular “excuse”). [...] In an extreme case, an author’s child was blamed of having spilled coffee into the computer"
"Most surprisingly, when confronted with the suspected fraud, quite often the corresponding authors very quickly (within very few hours and almost simultaneously!) agreed to a retraction without actually admitting the fraud openly." https://forbetterscience.com/2020/02/27/dark-satanic-papermills/
"corresponding authors blamed one of their graduate students (unnamed) of having generated “problematic” data, and that the respective student had already faced consequences (“punishment”) [...]content of the emails was close to zero when it came to answering specific questions"
"Editor-in-Chief received emails from authors from apparently different groups within a short period of time (minutes to hours!) as if the emails were sent by one and the same person under different email addresses. It was also noted that the text was rather similar. "
"When Editors used reviewers proposed by authors[..] reviews were delivered in unusually short time (minutes!)[..] “fake reviewers” were not used as 1st-choice referees by the editors but as “very last-choice” when multiple attempts (up to 10) to recruit trusted referees failed"
"a paper administratively withdrawn from our files because of suspected fraud was submitted shortly thereafter to another pharmacological journal, the only major difference being that the list of authors was totally different."
Here it is @wileyinresearch https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/fcp.12576
Here it is @wileyinresearch https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/fcp.12576
"It must be assumed that a specific political climate in this country strongly fosters the use of paper mills. It cannot be excluded that paper mills operate in other countries as well."
Sometimes the journal works with the mill! https://forbetterscience.com/2021/01/21/victims-as-perpetrators/
Sometimes the journal works with the mill! https://forbetterscience.com/2021/01/21/victims-as-perpetrators/
"With an average of about 1,000 submissions per year to our journal in 2019 and 2020, we come to the sad conclusion that around 5% of the submissions to our journal were from paper mills." https://forbetterscience.com/2020/09/14/dead-horses-wont-flog-themselves/
