Associate Professor, Department of Library and Information Science and Co-ordinator, Centre for Publication Ethics, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, INDIA.
Indian J Med Ethics. 2024 Jul-Sep;IX(3):222-227. doi: 10.20529/IJME.2024.025.
The primary objective of any research, regardless of its domain such as health, technology, psychology, or any other subject, is to enhance the overall well-being of individuals. Rigorous processes are involved in conducting research ethically and in communicating its outcomes to society. However, as publishing research has become a mandatory requirement for career advancement and appointments, academics are resorting to several unethical practices to get substandard work published quickly. Consequently, predatory publishing markets have emerged, which publish data that is falsified and fabricated, along with plagiarised textual matter. The emergence of "paper mills" is a further step in the corruption of research, where a group of persons or automated systems generate papers for publication. Anyone desirous of publishing a paper can purchase one, akin to any desired fast-moving consumer product, with the added guarantee of publication in indexed journals. Therefore, paper mills and their unethical modus operandi are discussed in this paper in detail, with relevant examples. The article unfolds the consequences of publishing such fraudulent research papers and concludes with the challenges in combating paper mills.
任何研究的主要目标，无论其领域是健康、技术、心理学还是其他任何学科，都是为了提高个人的整体福祉。进行研究并将其成果传达给社会需要经过严格的程序，但由于发表研究论文已成为职业发展和任命的强制性要求，学术界人士为了快速发表低质量的工作而采用了多种不道德的做法。因此，出现了掠夺性出版市场，这些市场发表的是伪造和捏造的数据，以及剽窃的文字内容。“论文工厂”的出现是研究腐败的进一步步骤，一群人或自动化系统为发表论文而生成论文。任何想要发表论文的人都可以购买一篇论文，就像购买任何所需的快速消费品一样，并且还可以保证在索引期刊上发表。因此，本文详细讨论了论文工厂及其不道德的运作方式，并提供了相关示例。文章揭示了发表此类欺诈性研究论文的后果，并总结了打击论文工厂的挑战。
