Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: evidence from a Russia-based paper mill

TL;DR

This study identifies and analyzes publication and collaboration anomalies in papers from a Russia-based paper mill, revealing suspicious patterns, potential forgeries, and the scale of the issue across multiple countries and journals.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of a specific paper mill's publications, highlighting collaboration anomalies and estimating the economic scale of the misconduct.

Findings

434 papers potentially linked to the paper mill

Suspicious collaboration patterns across 39 countries

Estimated $6.5 million value of coauthorship slots

Abstract

This study attempts to detect papers originating from the Russia-based paper mill International publisher LLC. A total of 1009 offers published during 2019-2021 on the 123mi.ru website were analysed. The study allowed us to identify at least 434 papers that are potentially linked to the paper mill including one preprint, a duplication paper and 15 republications of papers erroneously published in hijacked journals. Evidence of suspicious provenance from the paper mill is provided: matches in title, number of coauthorship slots, year of publication, country of the journal, country of a coauthorship slot and similarities of abstracts. These problematic papers are coauthored by scholars associated with at least 39 countries and submitted both to predatory and reputable journals. This study also demonstrates collaboration anomalies and the phenomenon of suspicious collaboration in questionable papers and examines the predictors of the Russia-based paper mill. The value of coauthorship slots offered by International Publisher LLC in 2019-2021 is estimated at $6.5 million. Since the study analysed a particular paper mill, it is likely that the number of papers with forged authorship is much higher.