RANKING PRESSURE TAKES TOLL ON RESEARCH CREDIBILITY

As fake research 'papermills' exploit system, B-Schools scramble to safeguard the credibility of their research institutions.

- Manoj Sharma

IN 2023, the name Dionisio Lorenzo Villegas, professor and dean at Spain's Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias in Las Palmas, started appearing in research papers across reputed journals. His collaborators came from far-flung regions such as India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.

As it turned out, following an investigation by Retraction Watch, a platform that tracks retractions across scientific publications, he was part of the so-called "academic papermill". Without actual research, he bought his way into these publications by paying $290-400 and managed to publish sixseven articles in reputed journals.

The ringmaster of the operation was Chennaibased Sarath Ranganathan, who ran an entity called iTrilon. Now disbanded, it sold authorship of 'readymade papers' to researchers. Publication was 'guaranteed' in globally recognised journals indexed on platforms such as PubMed and Scopus, thanks to Sarath's 'connections. In fact, Sarath ran a WhatsApp group, a 1,024-member community, where he assured 'guaranteed acceptance' across major journals. But as fate would have it, his activities came to the notice of 'science sleuths', a researchers' community dedicated to exposing such scams. Media scrutiny forced Sarath to deactivate his entire social presence. An infographic shared by him in May 2023 boasted of publishing over 291 papers, with "91% in journals indexed on PubMed, WoS, and Scopus".

In a separate incident in May, John Wiley & Sons Inc., a $3 billion NYSE-listed company that publishes around 1,400 academic papers every year, brought the curtains down on its Hindawi imprint, which had published around 250 journals. The Wiley unit retracted at least 11,300 research papers and shut down 19 journals after a probe found fake articles.

The two incidents offer a sneak peek into the million-dollar illicit 'research black market', where everything, from authorship to bogus research is on sale, for just a few dollars.