Paper mills: challenges, current understanding and unanswered questions - Anna Abalkina

Abstract: Paper mills represent for-profit entities that sell papers and co-authorships, guaranteeing publication. Because knowledge about paper mills remains fragmented and varies depending on the discipline or country, the presentation will discuss what we know about paper mills from the perspectives of their origin, the number of papers they produce, their patterns, and the gaps that exist in our understanding. The presentation will provide examples of some paper mills and discuss their anomalies.
The presentation will also analyze the challenge of identifying paper mills, as it relies on manual analysis of problematic patterns or “red flags”, such as image manipulation, plagiarism, suspicious emails, errors, similar formatting and paper structure, problematic citations, and violations of peer review processes. However, recent advancements in forensic scientometrics, text, linguistic, and statistical similarity analysis offer new opportunities for the detection of problematic papers. The presentation will also discuss the current state and challenges of literature correction due to the threat of paper mills.
Bio: Dr. Anna Abalkina is a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Perugia (Italy) with a background in International Economics. However, she later shifted her research focus to corruption in higher education, academic misconduct, plagiarism, paper mills, and predatory and hijacked journals. Her research not only involves detecting and analyzing scientific misconduct but also explaining its costs and consequences.
Since 2013, Anna Abalkina has been actively serving as an expert for Dissernet, a grassroots initiative aimed at detecting plagiarism in Ph.D. theses and scientific papers in the Russian language. Since 2021, she has successfully detected and investigated several paper mills, identifying more than 1000 papers with potential authorship fraud and/or violations of peer review. In 2022, Anna Abalkina in collaboration with Retraction Watch created "The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker," a regularly updated list of hijacked journals.