Abstract

Publications are the life-blood and currency of academia. They are the primary means by which scientific results are communicated as well as often the key metric by which the productivity and prestige of academics are judged. In many institutions the higher your number of publications, and the more those publications are cited, the more likely you are to get a permanent job or be promoted. As academics we expect that a paper we read in a journal is original and was written by the authors named at the top of the article. This is not just because we expect others to conduct research with integrity but also because a published article has been seen by an editor and been through peer-review. Sadly, however, in recent years there has been an explosion in papers that do not meet these expectations. In this talk I will introduce several kinds of publication fraud that you should be aware of: automated paraphrasing of existing works by software; special issues which are anything but; and the sale of authorship of scientific papers on social media. I will also discuss the drivers of publication fraud and consider what we can do about it.