Readership awareness series – Paper 3: Paper mills

Elsevier

Available online 3 February 2023

The Ocular SurfaceAuthor links open overlay panel, Section snippetsModus operandi

While the modus operandi is still poorly understood, the paper mills broadly offer five services: selling fake manuscripts, selling authorships, data fabrication, facilitating fake peer-review, and citation manipulation [5,6]. Interestingly, they can easily be disguised as manuscript editing services of contract research companies. They usually use manuscript templates across disciplines with stock images to meet their mass production targets and precisely target indexed publications. Hence the

Pointers to indicate a possible papermill manuscript [5–12]

Numerous pointers can enable the detection of a papermill manuscript. It is important to remember that a papermill manuscript usually has several of these pointers put together. The presence of only one or two pointers may not be reflective of a papermill but would be an indication to further probe for individual misconduct.

1.

Several manuscripts may have similar titles, layouts, and formatting patterns.

2.

The authors' expertise does not match the subject of the manuscript.

3.

The authors' affiliations

How do we tackle it?

The journal editors and the manuscript handling staff should be aware of paper mills. The younger readership and research students are the primary targets. Hence, it is equally important for the readership and all authors to be aware of such traps that can lure them toward unethical scientific practices.

The journals and their publishers should have a clear policy regarding the paper mills to deter their publication and ensure the authenticity of published papers [5,6]. It would be helpful to

Declaration of competing interest

None.

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