Welcome back to the penultimate post featuring Dr Nick H. Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. If you have been with us for the previous two posts, you would know that besides being a scientist and an engineer, Nick has made his name as a scientific sleuth who, based on an article on the blog Retraction Watch which was written in 2022, is responsible for more than 850 retractions, leading Times Higher Education to dub him as a research fraudbuster. Since then, through his X account @Nickwizzo, he has continued his investigations, tracking cases of fraud and in some cases, naming and shaming the charlatans. In this four-part series, we will learn from Nick about some of the shady activities that taint the scientific publishing industry today.
In part three, we learn from Nick about 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 desperately coping to meet with the unrealistic expectations of academia (to the point of engaging with fraud). Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here.
Citation count was once a proxy for quality and now it is citation count regardless of quality. People are only looking at the citation count, and not the actual quality. Actually assessing quality takes a lot more effort.
‘Salami slicing’ and the Game of Citations
LO: What do you think is better for science? A slower, more thoughtful process of publishing and everything in between? Or more information, more research, but then things like fraud slip through and occur more frequently?
NW: I don’t think there’s necessarily more research. Another phenomenon that paper mills take advantage of is salami slicing. Imagine you have completed a research project. Now you could write this up as one, thirty-page paper or two, twenty-page papers. You could write two comprehensive papers or try to put out multiple ten-page papers where you have some minor parameters changed. I see this happening in nanofluids research because it is an area of research close to mine. The nanofluid is simply a base liquid – it might be water, it might be ethanol – and into that you mix these very small nanoscale particles of some other material, such as gold, silver, or iron oxide. And in this sort of mixture of liquid and particles, you want to investigate its fluid flow and describe this with some differential equations. You can use computers to solve the differential equations and then plot some results about velocity profiles and heat transfer coefficients, etcetera. Now, you could write a paper for a given situation where you say, I’m not going to specify the liquid, but here is a general and viscosity of this liquid. If you want to apply this to your own research, you plug in the density and viscosity of your liquid, and likewise the particles. I’m not going to specify which particles are used, because all that changes is their density and their heat transfer coefficient properties. So that’s one way you could do it.
Another way to do it is to go I’m going to write a paper about water and gold particles; that’s one paper. Then you can write another paper which has water and silver particles, and then you can write one with ethanol and iron oxide, and there are so many varieties. You can also vary the geometry that this flow is going around, and you can add in an electric field and a magnetic field, etcetera. You can build up in this n-factorial way. There are thirty possible liquids multiplied by a hundred possible particles and multiplied by however many geometric configurations. You can see that this is what they are doing. Rather than writing a few quite general comprehensive papers, they are writing hundreds of very specific papers which enables them to produce more papers and sell more authorships and put more citations in. But this overwhelm of papers produced; there’s still only so many peer reviewers, and so many editors. And this phenomenon happens in lots of fields, they find something where there are just these variables that they can keep writing almost the same paper. Yet, the paper is original. It has not been done before. It is incredibly derivative, but that is not necessarily a barrier to publication.
LO: What I’m getting from this is, this is part of the whole system, and the issue at hand is definitely enabled by certain motivations like getting more citations. You can take one big piece of salami or publish that in one book, or you can slice the salami thirty ways. And if they are in the position to slice the salami, they say why not, I suppose, right? A game is there to be played.
NW: Right, they are playing the game that is in front of them. And again, there are people who do this who are not from a paper mill. They just want to maximize the number of citations and publications. The question is why are they doing this? Why do they want to maximize their publications? Because they want a promotion, or they want a tenured job. There are also countries where you get a cash reward for publishing a paper in a good journal so the more papers you publish, the more money you get paid. Your government might have told all the universities that they need to increase their ranking in the World University rankings. How do you do that? By increasing your research output and the citations you get. That is another driver. These drivers come from all sorts of places but there is always an emphasis on numbers. Citation count was once a proxy for quality and now it is citation count regardless of quality. People are only looking at the citation count and not the actual quality. Assessing quality takes a lot more effort.
LO: Citations used to be a proxy for quality, but that is not the case anymore. But it still implies the quality of the research, or you would hope.
NW: You would hope, but only because there is an assumption that the only reason something has a lot of citations is because it is good quality. Citations are also easier to count. Quality is much harder to account for, but that incentivizes people to do things like cite their colleagues. Again, you could still track it if people from the same university were citing each other. But then you get bigger scale things with middlemen who organize people from across the world to cite each other or just do it for cash. If you are publishing and you are producing papers to order, each one of those papers has a reference section which is real estate. You can throw in and have some genuine references which are relevant to this paper, but you can also throw in some irrelevant references that someone paid you to include. You can also pay someone to include references that are actually relevant to a topic.
LO: If it is relevant to a topic, it is almost like merely encouraging someone to be aware of certain work as opposed to a scam, which sounds like a gray area.
NW: Well, I would say that as soon as someone is paying money, then it starts to be illegitimate. But I mean if someone emails you and says “I’ve just published this paper, I think you might be interested, it’s in your research field: maybe read it or maybe you do cite it”, it’s different from someone emailing you to say “I’ll pay you £50 if you cite my paper” and you do. Then I would say that you have crossed a line. So, it does get very gray. Then there are these organized paper mills who are doing this as a business and that is where I think it becomes quite clear that it is probably not legitimate.
Facebook (authorship) marketplace
NW: You could go on Facebook and there are people selling authorship of their paper as a one off. There are PhD students in some country with no research funding who say “it costs $2500 for the article processing charge for me to publish where I would like to publish, I do not have $2500 so if you pay the $2500, you can be first author on the paper” and that is the only way they can get their paper published. They’re not doing this as a business, they’re just doing this once for this one paper. And you get people responding. Quite often professors or more established academics with access to budgets are the ones who will say yes. And the only thing that the person has done is to provide the funding for the publication.
The minimum thing that one is supposed to have done to be considered an author is to have either written the draft or reviewed and edited the paper. You might have also done data analysis or conceptualization. I think we would agree that if all this person does is just pay the fee for publication, then that is not acceptable. But what if they read the paper and then made a couple of comments? Now they have reviewed and edited it, and so now they have done review, editing and funding. There are many big labs around the world that have some very senior scientist whose name is on every single paper that comes out of the lab. And what have they done? Well, they provided all the funding, and they have reviewed the paper. I bet there are some who have barely glanced at the paper. But let’s say that they have reviewed the paper, and they provided the funding for the publication. Is that what makes it different to the person on Facebook who has found some random professor from another country to pay for their publication? Where is the difference? I don’t think it is an easy line to draw. In this way, the move to Open Access publishing requiring large fees for publication has also driven quite a bit of this phenomenon.
LO: It also seems like you have developed a bit of empathy. Maybe you’ve looked at so many cases and you see that it’s not always clear.
NW: Absolutely. Again, if you have the people running a paper mill, or if you have some professor who is being bribed and waving through dozens of papers, I don’t have much empathy for them. But the Masters or PhD student who has been told that they have to publish papers to get their PhD or even a Masters and they have this demand placed on them, or they even have produced a paper but they need this on the all this money to get it published, I don’t blame them for what they’re doing. It’s the situation they’ve been placed in. It is the system that they are part of. I have a lot of empathy for them.
Look out for the final post coming next week, where we get Nick’s take on what he thinks should be the repercussions for engaging in fraud, and we get a parting tip from Nick on what researchers should do when performing a literature search on papers in their field.