Scientific sleuth Dr Nick Wise explores some of the shady activities that taint scientific publishing today in a podcast on research integrity summarised in four posts on OSC’s Unlocking Research blog. This podcast is part of the Data Diversity Podcast series run by the Office of Scholarly Communication’s Research Data Team.
Dr Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, is a research fraud investigator in his free time.
In the first post, we learn from him how he chases down ‘tortured phrases’ to identify papers where text has been run through paraphrasing software to get round plagiarism checks. He also walks us through how paper mills operate, sometimes bribing journal editors to guarantee acceptance for their customers who have bought authorships.
In the second post, he explores the peer review process and fake research data, and gives his thoughts on where fault lies in the publication of fraudulent research.
In the third post, he exposes how researchers try to generate more citations from a single piece of research through a trick called ‘salami slicing’ and the blurred lines between illegality and desperate efforts to meet the unrealistic expectations of academia (to the point of engaging with fraud).
The fourth post outlines what Nick thinks the repercussions should be for engaging in fraud, and leaves a parting tip on using PubPeer to flag any adverse comments about papers researchers come across when carrying out a literature search.