When Science is polluted

Fake data in false papers

A worrying study is suggesting that more than 0.1 % of the structures in the crystallographic databases could be fake.

A recent preprint identified over 800 publications that contain concerning duplications of images, phrases, and other data that point to data manipulation.

They suggest that all these papers come from a single ‘paper mill’ — a person, a company, or a group of people who ghostwrite publications for others.

This practice is particularly common is China where a certain number of first-author papers are mandated for promotions.

In August 2020, the Beijing municipal health authority released a policy outlining that a physician needs two first-author papers to be promoted to deputy chief physician and three such papers to become a chief physician.

Crystal structures apparently make for good papers — and the availability of some online tools makes data fabrication easy.

The challenge is that once these papers enter an established structure database like the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), then it pollutes further data sources and studies that use this data as the baseline.

800 papers contain around 1200 structures — which is roughly 0.1 % of the CSD.

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